I love XCOM’s Second Wave options almost as much as I love XCOM itself, which is quite a lot. Second Wave is a suite of design choices that were added to XCOM: Enemy Unknown in order to make the game harder, less predictable, a bit more weird. All of this, though, at the discretion of the player. Second Wave put a lot of power in the players’ hands.
Powers like Damage Roulette, which does exactly what it sounds like: weapons would suddenly inflict a wide variety of different damages. New Economy, meanwhile, did something very similar for XCOM funding – you might get huge amounts of money from the council, and then you might get pretty much zip. Elsewhere, Not Created Equally gave rookies a random selection of initial stats, which made a surprisingly massive impact on the game, moment to moment. Onward and outward – those are just the first three options Second Wave offered.
I think I love Second Wave not just because I love chaos, and because some weird, difficult part of me wants a cruel game to be that bit crueller still. I love Second Wave because it feels like a great compliment to the player to be offered it. You, Second Wave suggests, are a player of great creativity and attention to detail. You’re in the kitchen up to your elbows in spaghetti sauce. You leave Post-it notes to yourself about home bio-hacking projects and you do your own translations of the classics. None of this is remotely true of me, but I want it to be true, and fiddling with Second Wave makes me feel a bit more discerning, a bit more detail-oriented. It’s gorgeous stuff.
And I thought of Second Wave this week when I played Subpar Pool, which is a very different game from XCOM, being an immediately thrilling blend of pool and golf, in which you knock balls around a table and try to get them into holes. Subpar Pool is beautiful stuff, and the more I played, the more I got drawn into its card system.
Its card system is proper magic. Basically, as you play you unlock variables for the game in the form of these cards. They might offer a new ball type for the table – a ball that seeks the cueball, or a really giant ball that moves more slowly, or a ball that splits in two or a ball that shatters. Equally, they might offer changes to the basic rules. They might throw more balls in, or give you bigger tables to play on. They might force you to take your turns within a set time limit cranking up the pressure and the sense of panic and priming you for hilarious forced errors.