Wonder-movies

[LordT]

I thought... maybe it would be cool if we could add some "wonder-movies" when some more important research is made, like when interrogating a alien leader/commander, getting hover-technology, blaster-bombs and advanced crafts etc.?

 

I know this means alot of work, so that's why its in the wishlist forum

[Deimos]

I had a dream the other night, about xcom (which shows how into this I am as I don't usually remember my dreams)

 

Seeing as you mention the wonder movies, I think there is scope for little end of month movies, that show what progress or not is being made

 

Anyway my dream went roughly as follows.

 

X-com had taken a battering this particular month. Four separate terror missions, 16 lost soldiers, countless abductions and lots of reported UFO sightings. Seeing as X-com didn't have the Interceptors or the resources to stop all this alien activity, their funding was not surprisingly dropped. At the start of the next month, the surviving squaddies were sat in the rec room idly doing off duty soldiering things, playing cards, play fighting and so on.

 

One of the troops nearest the door heard the access lift coming down and the sound of people inside it. This grabbed the attention of everyone else, who would be visiting an X-com base.

 

Financiers from the world's governments had come on a surprise tour of the facility to see what progress was being made and whether their level of funding could be dropped even further.

 

Eight men and six women came out of the lift dressed in drab grey pinstripe suits and carried briefcases. Each of them, though obviously from different countries wore the exact same cardboard grey dull expression on their faces that told anyone within a mile that they were accountants and bureaucrats.

 

As they were getting out of the lift one of the biggest and plucky soldiers grabbed a rifle and headed for them.

 

"Sorry this is an off limits area to civilian personnel" he barked in a tone that would scare the hardiest of Mutons.

 

A small-framed Oriental woman moved from the middle of the throng and stood squarely up this giant. "We have authorisation to be here" She spoke in a calm tone that didn't quite hide her fear of what this giant of a man could do to her. She held out some papers and waved them in his direction.

 

"We'll see about that,” said the giant soldier, roughly snatching the papers from her. "Follow me, I'm going to have to find somewhere secure to put you all till I sort this out."

 

He held out his arm, pointing the direction he wanted this group of suits to go and ushered them into the mess hall.

 

He barked an order to the rest of the soldiers in the hall, making it clear he had some authority. "Look after our guests, till I find out whether they have clearance or not" in a clearly sarcastic tone.

 

Two troopers flanked either side of the door to the main corridor and the rest slouched around in chairs throwing dangerous looks at the 'guests'.

 

After a few minutes of the Sergeant’s absence, one of the other soldiers clearly bored, struck up a conversation with the Oriental woman who had spoken earlier. "Since when is it Ok for just anyone to come rollin' in here like they own the place" He said with a southern American drawl.

 

Unphased, she replied "We represent the various world governments that are giving a considerable amount of money to this project, so in effect, we do own this place."

 

She smiled a tight little smile at how well her clearly rehearsed speech had come out and that she had a chance to say it.

 

Another trooper replied from behind her "The only time I’ve ever seen suits in a military operation is when they want to cut funding. Funny, we have a bad month and you lot suddenly turn up."

 

She whirled on him, taking the soldier by surprise "You have a responsibility to protect us from the clear and present danger that these unidentified craft pose." She stood up and held herself in her most authoritative pose she could muster. "You people are paid to protect the world." She paused for effect. "Something you haven't been doing too well so far. Need I remind you of your lack of performance this past month alone?"

 

The soldier moved so quickly the woman didn't have chance to react until the wind was knocked out of her as he pinned her to a nearby wall several feet from the ground. "Let me tell you about performance." He growled.

 

The other bureaucrats got to their feet and moved to help the woman, but were stopped by the rest of the off duty soldiers, who had all drawn laser pistols.

 

"Twenty highly trained, soldiers from various militaries around the world came to this project last moth alone. Each of them a credit to their nations. Not one of them were told why they were transferred here, an not one asked."

 

He adjusted his hands to cause the maximum discomfort for her without actually injuring the woman. "Do you know how many of them are left?"

 

The woman now with tears in her eyes caused by them pain shook her head. He continued" Four, that's right four. I guess you don't know what burnt flesh smells like do you. Ever see what a plasma burn does to a human body? No I don't expect you do. They have grenades that will rip the flesh right off your bones and that's not even the worst bit. Oh no, they have these creatures, black as night and fast as lightening. Know what they do? They don't kill you; they inject a fast acting poison into your body that actually turns you into the living dead. The only thing we can do for them is to kill them."

 

He tightened his grip slightly. "Kill our own people. Do you know how that makes you feel? The man that bunks next to you each night, eats at the same table and play cards with. You have to gun down in cold blood because if you don't he'll turn you into one of them."

 

The soldier was so close to her, she could feel his hot breath and spittle as he spoke. "But that isn't the worst part. When you kill your friend, he turns into another one of those beetle like creatures and if you don't kill it really quickly, it starts all over again. So don't talk to me about performance. You've got no idea, sat in your little office counting beans, about real performance."

 

He let her go and she dropped to the floor in an unceremonious heap.

 

The Sergeant returned. "It seems as though we are to give you every courtesy and to show you want you want to see. Sorry for the inconvenience."

 

A female trooper replied. "I think they've seen everything they need Sarge."

 

Just readjusted some of my spelling mistakes I should know better than to post without double checking

[Kaiser]

That sounds more like some scene from a movie.

To bad thare aren't any X-Com movies.

[Deimos]

That sounds more like some scene from a movie.

To bad thare aren't any X-Com movies.

Yeah it was a movie. In my head last night. So I'll take that as a compliment

[mikker]

Going a bit off topic...instand of movies, a text could be shown´at the end of the month, with the improvements done, good or bad, like:

 

march 2000:

You teared down you missile defences. However, you developed the heavy laser, and you build laser defences. Untill now, you have lost 21 troops, and at this point we are not satesfied. You have shot down a total of 43 ships, and of these 10 were assaults, but you have not actrly researched the captured attifacts to understand the alien behavior. More alien ships are going either undetected, or simply ignored, and at this point Negeria has been so mad, that they at this point have left the project.

 

Maybe a total menu, or logbook with coments from each nation, and specify their view points, like:

 

US- march 2000:

The terrorist attack on one of our major citys, had almost ended in failure. Many civilians had died. At this point, we are forced to lower or payment to the Xenocide project.

[LordT]

I still think it would be cool with a movie showing the alien commander being interrogated after researched, the avenger on it's test round and such.

[[[Micah]]]

Movies would be cool. Have fun making them On the other hand, mikker's idea of a summary of progress for the past month and to date, I like.

 

About a year (after not playing xcom for a couple of years) I had a vivid dream about a terror mission, just like you Lordt. I was one of the squaddies send in to save the civilians, in the dark, with no armor, with a crappy gun. That's pretty much all I remember, but boy was it an intense dream, just like a movie. Those are the best.

[LordT]

About a year (after not playing xcom for a couple of years) I had a vivid dream about a terror mission, just like you Lordt. I was one of the squaddies send in to save the civilians, in the dark, with no armor, with a crappy gun. That's pretty much all I remember, but boy was it an intense dream, just like a movie. Those are the best.

Uhmm... that was Deimos, he's the wierd one!

[Deimos]

Uhmm... that was Deimos, he's the wierd one!

Heh, but wierd in a good way

[Guest drewid]

Hey diemos. That's cool I coudl see it in my head with the dramatic lighting and close-ups and everything.

 

hints of apcalypse now or full metal jacket?

[Deimos]

Hey diemos. That's cool I coudl see it in my head with the dramatic lighting and close-ups and everything.

 

hints of apcalypse now or full metal jacket?

What can I say? I'm a GM I have to be good with descriptive text, just for that reason, to get a clear picture of the scene. Ok so I like creative writing as well as art It could be better though, some of the scenes are a little fuzzy IMO.

[[[Micah]]]

About a year (after not playing xcom for a couple of years) I had a vivid dream about a terror mission, just like you Lordt. I was one of the squaddies send in to save the civilians, in the dark, with no armor, with a crappy gun. That's pretty much all I remember, but boy was it an intense dream, just like a movie. Those are the best.

Uhmm... that was Deimos, he's the wierd one!

Oops

[Cubik]

That's pretty long a movie to only be used a an end of the month movie. It could instead be used to make some sort of story for future versions of the game.

 

Did any of you guys play UFO on the Playstation? Crap controls but it had little movies in the end of the game. I can still remember the little clip you got when you lost the game.

 

A alien and the President sits in a big room signing a peace treaty. As soon as the President has signed the papers, heavliy armed aliens bursts into the room. One of them presses a gun to the Presidents temple. Cut to the sitting alien. He watches the President, a gun is fired, a small spat of blood hits the aliens' cheek and start running downwards.

 

I thought this was damn cool the first time I saw it .

[mamutas]

Beautiful story, Deimos! I almost dropped some tears when I was reading about 4 left soldier...

 

I like the idea to have more texts at the end of the month especially the summary of everything happened: missions lost, ships destroyed, etc.

[Guest drewid]

That's pretty long a movie to only be used a an end of the month movie. It could instead be used to make some sort of story for future versions of the game.

 

Did any of you guys play UFO on the Playstation? Crap controls but it had little movies in the end of the game.  I can still remember the little clip you got when you lost the game.

 

A alien and the President sits in a big room signing a peace treaty. As soon as the President has signed the papers, heavliy armed aliens bursts into the room. One of them presses a gun to the Presidents temple. Cut to the sitting alien. He watches the President, a gun is fired, a small spat of blood hits the aliens' cheek and start running downwards.

 

I thought this was damn cool the first time I saw it .

There was another version of that one.

There were a few more frames of the gunshot, and a fare bit more blood.. It got cut back cos Sony didn't l

like it.

 

I think I've got a flc of it somewhere.

 

Not my best animation tho

[Deimos]

I loved that animation Especially the look on the humans face when the sectoid entered the room. Sort of an 'oh shuckeroonies' expression. Class.

[[[Micah]]]

The PSX videos are downloadable from here:

http://xcomufo.com/videos.html

They are in divx format.

[Breunor]

Very cool movies! I'd never seen any of them before. What do you all think about having an animated newscaster sitting at a desk with a screen of to the side, and they could say some basic things. The screen would display your score for the month, income, etc. Earlier versions could just have the person say "Here's some late breaking news, etc", but later versions could include text to speech coding (maybe). I used to teach the blind, and the software to provide text to speech does a good job these days. The main issue is licensing as usual. I don't know about any open source versions, but there's always hope, right?

[revenant4]

Let me know if I'm wrong here, but, I think it's hillarious how this forum started out as LordT talking about in game movies and then it turns into talking about a dream...then to movies about the progress of the game on the site...hey LordT I think that would be an awsome idea about the interagation of aliens...(that's if we speak their language )

[Moriarty]

in-game movies would be cool and I'd love to see a newscaster trying to explain the things that are going on around the world

 

there's a design issue for the newscaster idea, though, which might easily start a whole discussion about design in general... let's see.

my point is this: if there is going to be something like news reports (kinda like in "Master of Orion 2"), what will they look like? specifically, what will the anchorperson look like? if it's going to be CG (that is, 3d-animation CG) it had better be real good, because _nothing_ is as bad as a not-quite-perfect CG human.

I personally like the style of the original xcom game, especially the intro: there you have the nice CG skyranger and ufo (what is it again, a battleship?), but all the battle cutscenes are comic-style.

perhaps this kind of mixture can be incorporated into xenocide, but then all the rest of the game is projected as true 3d, everything rendered nicely. I don't know if anything else will fit into the general design. what do you think?

[sir_schwick]

I never liked it when games put in video cut-scenese. Interstate '76 achieved a good ambiance by rendering cut-scenes with the engine. Maybe a special map with an X-COM representative as a unit and all th representative in a room with a world map and several podiums. At the end of the month you can choose to play the 'Budget Mission'.

 

Your guy behind the podium could carry whatever equipment he wanted. he could even invite troopers to demonstrate skills or do status reports. You would get a chance to use a 'talk' gun by using the podium. You could target questions, insults, praise, begging, etc. at various representatives. If the aliens found out where this meeting was, thye might send a crew down to kill everyone.