So I was browsing through Destructoid just before heading off to bed (as I am wont to do) and I stumbled across a little story that had me shaking my head in bewilderment. For those of you who don’t wish to follow that link I’ll save you the trouble. There’s going to be a new XCOM game! And it’s going to be a first-person shooter… Ugh.

Now why is that such a bad thing? I’ve got nothing against FPSes personally, in fact I quite enjoy them from time to time. No, my problem is simply the IP that is being given the FPS treatment. For those of you who aren’t familiar with XCOM (and that is probably a large number of you) I’ll fill you in as to what XCOM is all about.

XCOM started out as an unforgiving strategy game broken up into a macro-scale world management component and a micro-scale squad battle system. The story was something about aliens attacking the Earth so the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit or XCOM has to save the day, blah blah blah. If you couldn’t already tell there was nothing special about its story or setting. What was special was its game play. Now, if you’re interested in what the game was all about feel free to look it up online (the wikipedia entry isn’t half bad) but suffice it to say that the game was very complex, extremely deep, and it had no qualms about kicking your ASS!

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The MAG Boxart

It was only by a stroke of luck that I found myself with a copy of MAG. Some relatives from the United States had come over to visit and, not knowing what I liked, bought a US copy of MAG for me to play on my PS3.

So I fired up the sucker, and after around 40 minutes of updating (had to ever restart the update so it would complete, for some reason), I was ready to play MAG. However, I don’t think the game was ready for my triumphant arrival.

The connection to the server kept getting lost (with a 13:5 error message), and I was only able to get into three games, with two games actually keeping me out of the action as if I were kicked out anyway. The one game I did play, I was slaughtered mercilessly, but did manage to kill one person.

As it stands, I’m hoping my connection can handle MAG, because if not, then I’ll be disappointed that either my connection sucks, or the American server wasn’t prepared for someone halfway across the world to come out and play.

Anyway, time for some research on the issue to see if I can get into the game.