Okay, NOW do you believe I didn't like this game?
You know, for all the things Interceptor does wrong (such as replacing the delightful tactical combat with the worst TIE Fighter game in the history of galaxies far far away), at least it's actually an X-COM game. Enforcer, on the other hand, is a run-and-gun adventure in which you shoot crummy looking aliens with crummy looking guns while a scientist yammers incessantly at you in an infuriating fake lisp. Imagine that in your brain for a second.
Are you imagining it?
Pretty terrible, right? Okay, now make it half as fun as you're thinking and you'll probably be pretty close to what playing X-COM Enforcer is actually like. Your character is slippery, there's very little feedback from the environment, everything looks lousy even when you adjust for the graphics tech of the time, and the whole game seems to take place at arm's length, constantly denying you any chance to get personally involved.
Gee SB, why don't you tell us what you really think?
Okay: I HATE YOU. Almost as much as I hate the scientist in this game. He has officially earned a spot on my Most Hated Video Game Characters list, right between Navi and that motherfucker from Excitebike. God, what a dick.
First of all, he has some incredibly cliche narration. Whoever wrote this guy's dialogue just took notes while watching every 80s movie about science nerds. Secondly, the lisp is really grating and he goes out of his way to include S sounds in his sentences. He can't just ask you to defend the lab from the aliens; no, it always has to be "THTOP THOTHE INTHIDIOUS OUTTHIDERTH FROM THMASHING MY THIENTH TO THMITHEREENTH!" Finally--and somehow I find this even more annoying than the gratuitouth lisping--he speaks in that awkward stilted manner so commonly reserved by lazy Hollywood writers for geeks and nerds. For example, one of his first lines of the game is "The invaders are drawing closer by the nanosecond!" While this is technically true, I can't help but note that THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK AND WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH "SECOND"? IS "SECOND" NOT SCIENCEY ENOUGH FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?
Whew. Sorry for the outburst. I think a big part of my tremendous distaste for Interceptor and Enforcer comes from my respect for the earlier entries in the series. If crappy games have a beloved franchise attached to them, it's so much worse than them just being crappy games in a vacuum; imagine, if you will, an alternate timeline in which the Sonic the Hedgehog team ruined that beloved franchise by producing a terrible game with mechanics only barely related to its namesake. It is not only that they have produced garbage, but that they have besmirched what came before, in effect going back in time and stealing some of the wonder from our remembered childhood selves.
Truly a horrifying concept. Let us all give thanks that we do not live in a world where such an atrocity has happened over and over again with terrible clockwork precision for like 15 years.
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