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OpenXcom 1.0 Released
It's a small class of video games that still draw interest or inspire an active community 20 years after their first release — even if we're now 40 years into the era of commercial video games. Games like Doom, the several iterations of Civilization, and the Mario Brothers franchise will probably be around and played in some form many decades hence. The X-COM family of games fits, too, having inspired various spiritual successors since its release in 1994. Now, an anonymous reader writes that the open source (GPL) " OpenXcom 1.0 is finally released, after 5224 commits, 1843 days, and 606 resolved issues since v0.9. 20 years of X-COM — XCOM oldschool lovers enjoy!"
I personally didn't care for any of the sequels that followed XCOM/XCOM:TFTD - none of them seemed to capture that sublime perfection that is the gameplay of the original, most seemed like cash-ins on the IP. So, I was very surprised to find that the current Firaxis title was actually surprisingly, surprisingly good. I learned that recreating the original game in the engine they built was their first step in creating the new title, and clearly it was created with love. So, I say this for any fans who may have been like me, and avoided the titles strictly because historically the sequels stunk to high heaven.
Having said that, it still doesn't completely scratch that itch that only a game of nice, classic Xcom. Dosbox has always been an option of course, but Xcom has bugs, and while using "XcomUtil" (http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=XcomUtil) can fix many of these problems, the work of the OpenXCOM to give us such a wonderful, expandable, moddable version of such a giant of PC gaming is simply astounding. As I read over the documentation, I can't wait to give this a shot. Really want to thank these guys for such a wonderful job - my memories of the summer of 94 and this game are very fond indeed.