X-Com.

Night mission (Ick.), terror attack. (Which is why it was a night mission.)

I had about ten hardcore veterans in power armour and such, and three or four guys in the back with the lowest-level armour (Cannae remember the name now. The blue guff.). Spread out from the Skyranger (Why I still had that, I don't know.), and started taking a few Snakemen out. Snakemen was a terrible thing, because it meant Chrysalids, and let me tell you, I'd rather be locked in a creepy old wooden-floored dust-filled house with nothing but Fatal Frame and Silent Hill to play than face Chrysalids.

Anyway, here come the bastards. One of them sprints out of the darkness, straight at my doods. Who promptly return fire with like nine oppurtunity shots. Seven miss, two hit, he's still standing - and running. Reaches the first guy, rapes his brain, does the same to TWO MORE. Next turn, my survivors fall back, except one, who I load up with loaded Alien Grenades. Like five of them. He saunters up into the middle of the pack and drops two . End turn, they go off, he dies, Chrysalid dies, zombies morph into three new Chrysalids. Now, my plan was to have my other three grenades, primed to go off and the end of the turn, explode and take out these guys.

WRONG! They sprint away, directly at my cowering innocents, and start tearing [img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img] up. By [img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img][img]/xxx.gif[/img] I mean my veteran soldiers of dozens of battles, who are the very best Humanity has, and who are rapidly becoming psychic overlords of amazing caliber. Yeah, them. Not any more. They're rapidly become torn asunder and/or their brains were impregnated with Chrysalid eggs. I -think- two guys survived, and I chucked some more grenades. The previous ones had, of course, exploded well after the Chrysalids left the vicinity. There was no point with anything else, because they didn't have the firepower to take out like three Chrysalids and six zombies, and there was no way to outrun them.

Enter my squad of four rookies, I don't think any of them was even up a single rank, having spent ages cowering in the back of the Skyranger. By which I mean something like 20 missions. (This was way back before I was awesomesauce, which is why my equipment is lacking and so forth.) Well, these doods stroll out like smurfing John Wayne or something, I mean they had laser pistols, and through some canny scavanging from Snakeman corpses, they wound up with plasma rifles. Then they proceeded to shoot the hell out of the Chrysalids and zombies, having taken up and excellent defensive position on the second floor of a house. Throw in some grenades, and BLAM! They won. They won, further, without a single injury. A little cleanup promptly led to two of them dying, but the last two finished up and walked away from the mission, surely into a lifetime of therapy and flashbacks.

It's missions like that, which have stuck in my head for near a decade, which are the reason X-Com is one of the best games ever. It's so simple, yet it allows so much.