I think of it more like a place to put personal opinions

I'm assuming that no one will read this post by the time this sale is over, but Direct 2 Drive is having a $5 sale on a bunch of games to celebrate their 5th anniversary, all month long.  5 weeks, actually.  Included are some of my favorites:  Titan Quest, Civ 4, and X-COM.

Ah, X-COM.

I played it on a friend's computer back in the bad old days of DOS memory management and windows 95 tomfoolery.  It was the coolest goddamn thing ever.

 

 Pictured: the coolest goddamn thing ever.

In the context of the times, it was as awesome as those outdated "Ultimate Gaming Machine" ads that say that no one could ever want more than 128 megs of RAM.  You controlled an ultimately expendable army of hopelessly outclassed human recruits whose only chance came in the form of stealing alien weaponry and expending the considerable assets of the free world on shit-tons of hi-tech research.  Aliens could still kill the hell out of your dudes, though, as could your own side's mis-thrown grenades and the fact that the game implemented line of sight so that corners were basically lethal traps spewing alien bullets.  Make no mistake, at 10 years old, this game was HARD.  It kicked our asses even as we succeeded in our mission goals.

There's a reason why this game is heralded as a cult classic and why the creator keeps trying to recapture the glory.  It's basically the best tactical miniatures board game (think Space Hulk) you've ever played on a computer, and the "realtime" research system bests the one from Syndicate (Bullfrog Productions i.e. PETER GODDAMN MOLYNEUX) even though it's about three years older. So yeah, it's a good game with solid concepts that were possibly even ahead of its time; that says cult classic to me no matter how many times you slice it.

If you haven't played X-COM and can put up with the pixellation, the first two games are easily worth the $5 dollars d2d is charging for all five.  Otherwise, check out UFO: Alien Invasion, a game heavily based off of the original X-COM (or UFO: Enemy Unknown as it's called in Europe).  Worth playing if you like Strategy RPG's like FFTactics, or anything mentioned in Kat Bailey's Strategery category on the 1up.com RPG blog.  Especially for $5.

I used to have a policy that said that any game on a $5 sale is probably worth checking out.  Glad to see that Digital Distribution has made this theory viable.

:SñrC

(image courtesy of GameSpot)