Behind The Scenes: "X-Com: The Wilderness Years"

Timberwolf

• 4 min read

Wilderness Years was my test video to see if I could do this kind of more tightly edited documentary style thing. I didn't intend to write Behind The Scenes style articles at first, so this is a hasty bit of doing my homework the night before for anyone who's interested in how the video came together.

Origins

My original intention was to follow up West Country with a longplay of X-Com: Apocalypse, a game where my skill level is best described as, "not quite so bad as I remember, I made it past the first week this time!"

When I mentioned X-Com in comments, I was surprised to find how few people knew of this game, or indeed that there were any games between UFO: Enemy Unknown and the 2012 reboot. When I started researching and found that there were games even I didn't know about, the seed for a video was planted.

Notes

Some fun things you might have spotted:

  • USO is actually the "correct" term used in Terror From The Deep. I couldn't resist pretending to be confused by what you'd call an underwater UFO.
  • My gameplay for UFO, TFTD and Interceptor is pretty bad compared to the exciting mid-game shown for Apocalypse. Particularly the underwater clip for TFTD where what I'm doing was clearly never going to work with rookies!
  • Yes, I avoided the trap of the urban myth about TFTD's difficulty not in fact being locked to Superhuman. This bug was also corrected in later versions of UFO: Enemy Unknown, only affecting early retail copies.
  • One regret I have is not being able to get hold of the Apocalypse beta with all the incomplete gameplay elements. The original game was ridiculously ambitious, I had to condense this down to a few highlights and what I could verify across authoritative sources.
  • Yes, that is me playing Alliance! (Complete with unwanted GeForce popups). There really isn't much to the leaked beta other than a few placeholder levels.
  • Did you spot the hidden Duke Nukem Forever reference?
  • I couldn't believe how well the Enforcer intro fit my narration about Infogrames taking over Hasbro, with MicroProse appearing on screen at just the right time.
  • A friend had Interceptor back in the day. I think some of the playability issues I have are timing-related, as I don't recall it being that bad running on a Pentium 133. Whether or not the flight was better originally, it still was not a popular game.
  • The cutaway joke of the Sega Genesis originally used a picture of a UK-spec Mega Drive, but I thought that was going to be a link too far for people to get the joke.
  • Yes, that is indeed my own copy of Invisible Touch, although my feelings toward it are best summed up by it being the record I chose to "explode" on the barbecue. When it comes to Genesis, I'm definitely in the 1970s camp.
  • There's so little to Email Games: X-Com that I ended up using the intro from UFO: Enemy Unknown to cover the gap between me picking up the topic and the reveal of the game.
  • Getting Email Games: X-Com to run was a bit of a mission in itself, as it expects to be able to send files to a central server which no longer exists. Luckily you can get them off the filesystem and open them as if you've been e-mailed them.
  • Even so, keen players may note that some of the popups and effects are missing from my footage. They work by creating new windows, which OBS was not happy about capturing.
  • "Precaching" lining up with me saying "Unreal Engine" is a deliberate joke for people who are painfully familiar with playing early Unreal games on vintage hardware.
  • I had to do a last-minute edit on the video, as originally I'd claimed TekWar was from 1996. I didn't realise it originally released before Duke Nukem 3D! Back in the day the publishers tried to push it again in the wake of Duke's success with a swathe of UK cover disk demos and reviews, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Build engine association.
  • I made the mistake of recording a bunch of gameplay footage before I recorded the script and assembled the timeline. This meant having nowhere near enough footage for some games, while others had way too much to fit in their short segments. It also meant the gameplay footage wasn't always that closely related to what I was talking about, although I have a few moments of synchronicity I'm proud of, including the Enforcer being beaten up by Sectoids while I'm talking about the eventual collapse of Hasbro Interactive.

Technical Bits

Does anyone care about this sort of stuff?

  • Commentary is recorded using a Shure SM-58, running into a Focusrite Solo with a Triton FetHead to boost up the signal a bit. I have one of the Shure accessory pop filters (which makes a big difference!) and use the 'AIR' setting on the Focusrite.
  • Initial cleanup is done in Audacity, with a compressor, noise gate and limiter. Because this filter chain takes a few seconds of audio to stabilise there are always a few seconds of me singing, making silly noises or talking utter nonsense on the first few seconds of an audio track before I edit it.
  • I run the commentary through Izotope RX-8 before loading it into the timeline. It doesn't need much extra cleanup, although I usually do a little bit of click removal (both general clicks and mouth clicks), and run it through loudness control with the "Podcast Delivery" setting to get the levels really even.
  • I think this was one of the first videos I assembled using KdenLive rather than OpenShot, perhaps I got a little carried away with some of the wipe options here or there...