3am Eternal

Or in my case, 6am.

Oops.

My daily cycle is more like 26 hours instead of the normal 24 ... Dunno why that is but on a normal work day, it feels like I'm wide awake and could go for another 2 hours come midnight. That makes it really awkward for getting the sleep to get me through the next day.

(There's an answer - and it's hidden somewhere in the coffee jar)

Anyway, in a working week, it doesn't mean much as I keep to the work-home cycle. I aim to get in around 9am, which means legging it around 5pm. Or whenever I get done what needs to be done - flexi time can be wonderful for gaining credit in the week to be burned on legging it home at lunchtime (ish) on a Friday.

Of course, when I'm on leave that work-home cycle isn't acting like a 24 hour anchor. I have to be careful or I drift into getting up when it's dark. Ok, maybe not that extreme but 6am was pushing it. And I could have kept going too :-).

The reason ?

I'm saving the planet at the moment. One antique game I still pull out occasionally is called UFO Enemy Unknown. It dates all the way back to 1994 and was one of those rare perfect (outside of bugs!) fusions of tactical and strategic gameplay. I think I've written a few things about it in the past. Everything it tried to do, it did perfectly. That's a mistake a lot of games make, they try to do too much and botch up parts of what they try (Mass Effect 3's quest log is a key feature but broken).

So - UFO. It's one of those rare games that draws you in and can genuinely terrify you. The strategic element includes keeping track of your soldiers. They're not faceless, they grow with you as you go through the game. You kinda get attached to them too. But ... this is UFO, it's a very brutal game. The balance between firepower and defence is very heavily in favour of firepower. Combine that with close quarter arenas where the aliens can pop out of nowhere with little warning, bite your best soldier and turn them into another alien.

Yep. It hit the spot.

So much so that even though many people have attempted the concept and not got it right, they've gone for a full remake under the Firaxis banner. I picked this one up on release and have put about 10 hours into it so far. Including a "just one more mission" session that ended up concluding at 5.30am today.

Brief summary of the new one ? It does less than the original. Arenas are more claustrophobic, the original game could randomly generate some humungous maps from its tileset. Squad size is a maximum of 6 instead of 26 in an Avenger. But what it does it does to a very high standard, although I'm not too sold on the panic system.

In terms of the role play aspect of getting you genuinely concerned about your guys, it has that for sure. And that's probably enhanced by that much smaller squad size. Your people don't get lost in the noise of their pitter-pattering feet (this really bugged Ravenwolf!), you notice them more. Right now, my squad is being led by Nat "Spider" Hart, ace sniper, while the boss Colonel Jose "Wolverine" Dominguez recovers from injury.

Here's the squad, about to go on mission :

Sadly, it's after I lost a few people. It's rare that a game makes you sad for the loss of characters within but it's a measure of success with this one that you care that your first medic died because you carelessly less them out of cover. Or your Major "Doomsday" Santiago died because you were carelessly rushing forward to try and stun aliens so you can steal their weapons to satisfy the XCom Council.

I've been enjoying this one so far, although I'm either being suitably cautious or I'm playing at too easy a difficulty level. If you'd like to see more, then here's the Totalbiscuit first impressions (after being caught in the game for an 18 hour session). But beware, if you watch that video you're highly likely to do what I did and immediately buy the game looking for a modernised version of the original.

Now then - there's aliens out there and Col. Dominguez is telling me I've had enough downtime ...

PS Where's that title come from ? When I was growing up, there was this band called the K.L.F. They were insane. Completely different to pretty much anyone else out there. Ahead of their time and all that. But ... can you get their music now ? Nope. And I just found out the reason - here's their wiki page ... Entire back catalogue deleted in 1992. Cor.