This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

Hmm... a couple of early '90s PC strategy games running into each other here... unfortunate indeed!

Syndicate is an interesting and important game, but suffers from Peter Molyneux Disease - it's never quite as revolutionary as it seems like it would be and it goes on way longer than it ought to.

It's kind of surprising just how many details are present in X-COM: UFO Defense that didn't make it through to the later successor series. The individual pieces are all similar, but the core of X-COM was more similar to a grand strategy game (real time with pause, free reign to hire scientists/engineers any time, make a new base, add new facilities)... you could choose to follow a UFO rather than shooting it down, and then capture it intact. Your limiting factor wasn't a set of "obvious tradeoff" options presented to you as an either/or, it was the budget you were given by the member nations. In the tactical mode you didn't have the "free move" for enemies where you find a "node" as you explore, enemies were wandering from the start. It was a much more suspenseful game, even bordering on horror at times.

I remember hoping that as computers got more powerful, we would see more intricate simulations. Not the direction the industry ended up going, by and large.

Not saying new XCOM is bad, but it's a different style of game. Your decision tree is like railroad switches, rather than striking out in whatever direction you feel with the budget and constraints that you start with.

I remember liking Syndicate, but it has been years since I last went back to it. I seem to remember that it sounded more interesting that it actually was.