That's it!!! This is the X-Com game that we deserve here on GOG! :D
Don't believe me?? Ooohhoohoo, you're in for a world of a-hurtin', buddy! Please do allow me to let my old compadre Angry Joe school you're feeble mind!
[url=]http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/bt/aj/ajsreview/25809-ufo-extraterrestrials[/url]

Aye, UFO: ET was great. And there are plenty of mods to make it even more XCOM-esque. Sadly, it changed just enough for the diehard fans to shun it (because clearly nothing should EVER have been changed :p).
a Gold edition came out that includes most of BMan's mod, and a Prequel is being worked on that should be even better.

The problem with a lot of these X-Com wannabes is that they are different enough so 2K can't sue them. The trouble is those differences are enough to put off the die hard fans. In the case of UFO:ET it's not set on Earth which is a killer for a lot of us.

Which is actually a perfect example of why people will never be happy with an XCOM remake/sequel. Screw the gameplay and art style. The fact that the texture on the geoscape was slightly different is enough to make a game bad...

The community took this one and ran with it though, bringing it as close to the X-Com spirit as any game has come since the originals. I can't recommend "Greyfiend's Unimod" (http://www.ufogr.com/ufoet/eng/installation.html) highly enough. - you may have heard of Bman's mod, Greyfiend took it and ran with it, still fine tuning to this day, after Bman stopped work on his.
Yes, you can play on Earth.

I think the reason BMan stopped work on his is because he joined the dev team.

No you are missing my point. The original was set on Earth with real nations and a fictional agency that tied in with a lot of TV shows that we all remember. It added character to the game, character you lose when you take it out of that environment. It's the same as Star Trek: Voyager. It's the same format and it's still Star Trek but remove well known races like Klingons, Romulans etc and replace them with no-names like Hirogen and Malon and you find the fanbase no longer cares.

So that means gameplay had no impact whatsoever on things, and you would be perfectly okay with an FPS set in that universe? :p
Seriously, that is the problem. Unless something is a carbon copy of XCOM, it won't be accepted. And if it IS a carbon copy (and I mean right down to using the same sprites), people will whine that they are rebuying it.

Nobody called you a "whiny fanboy". I might have called you a "bitch" in the past, but only because Jesus has girly hair :p
And my point is, even those incremental changes are going to be enough to throw the XCOM fans into a crazy argument. We have people saying that the reason ET sucks is because it isn't set on Earth. Can you see how that could be construed as nit-picking?
What next? The chrysalid 's color isn't right?
Yeah, we all want a "faithful" remake, or at least we say we do. But it just seems to me like XCOM fans in particular don't. They don't WANT a remake or an incremental update or anything.
I also love how you try to make this an insult and say I am forcing stuff down your throat :p. All I am saying is, keep your mind open. Maybe something isn't a carbon copy (hell, I wouldn't be surprised if people complained that the game was irrevocably ruined by being able to be run at a higher resolution (because we all want character, gameplay, and visuals. The low-res visuals are characteristic of the series, and it is an abomination to scale them :p)), but that doesn't necessarily mean it is horrifyingly bad. And do we really want to have to eat as much crow as the NMA folk? :p

For the record I never said the game sucks. My original point was that a lot of the UFO games are different from X-Com for very good legal reasons. I'm sure there are plenty of people who enjoyed the games but they are not my cup of tea. Not being set on Earth is a big turn off for me because while the game may be called UFO: ET the humans in question are infact extraterrestrials themselves with the game being based on another planet. What you have with UFO: ET is a space based management/colony game which shares some gameplay features with X-Com. It's like comparing one Tower Defence game to another.

One of the reasons Terror From the Deep didn't work for me well was atmosphere, which is perhaps the key component of horror. The underwater environments had two major things wrong with them -- they were very repetitive, and they didn't have the spookiness you can get from having ordinary surroundings turned scary with hidden menace.
That's pretty important. When Stephen King does horror stories, he doesn't set them in torture chambers, but in suburbia. Torture chambers turns the volume to 11 and leaves the story and psychology nowhere to go because it's already there. Suburbia makes everything feel more like a scary violation of the way things are supposed to be. You start the volume at 1 instead of 11 so you have somewhere to go. You can build. You can still be surprised.
The fields, stores, and urban neighborhoods of the original X-COM were a big part of what made them work. That's the scary thing -- that a monster could be in your own house, or next door leisurely chewing the head of a neighbor, not that a monster could be on Mars or some other exotic setting.
Don't underestimate how much X-COM was X-COM not simply because of something like its game engine, or even because of a couple of things you particularly liked, and that its success is therefore easily transferrable. X-COM probably works so well because it is a collection of so many things working right, and all coming together to work that way at once. Remove or change a part and you wind up changing the whole, not just that part.

Can I just point out that saying things like "X-Com fans" is itself not helpful as many of those fans did indeed embrace the UFO-like games that were spawned from X-Com.
All the games were flawed in one way or another though, much in the same ways as TFTD or apocalypse. Hence the modding.
Of course, all these points are invalid since we are in the process of getting multiple X-Com or X-Com-like games in the next few months/years.
Behold!
OpenXcom - Open source version of UFO: Enemy Unknown (requires a valid copy of UFO)
UFO: The Two Sides - major upgrade of UFO (requires a valid copy of UFO, in open beta)
XCOM - I think we all know this one, which I will dub "Bioshock meets the X-Files" because I can.
Xenonauts - An interesting new UFO like game, with lots of nifty features. Loads of info on the website, very promising.
And of course there are projects like UFO2:ET (recent news! I had written this off for dead...), Project Xenocide (possibly dead), UFO: Cydonia's Fall (also possibly dead).

It is more polite to say "xcom fans" :p
And yeah, there is a crapton coming down the pipeline, but there has also been a crapton that already passed by. The problem is that the "diehard fans" are still going to view it as not good enough.
Plus, you'll understand if I am incredibly skeptical of any of the freeware endeavors. :p

Not to the people who get grouped in with them when you use such a general description (which was the point Andy_Panthro was making). Plus your "politeness" is about as transparent as a window. :p