Saving the Planet....from Extraterrestrials

The X-Com franchise is one of my all time favorites. I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings to play the original before Pop would kick me off the computer.

I never realized that making custom soldiers would be such a draw, though. 

I customized a soldier into Carrie "Wifey" McC. I even gave her some Celtic warrior face paint in honor of our trip to Scotland. I did it as a joke will fiddling around with the idea of starting another ironman campaign. 

I didn't expect Carrie to show up on an intro mission. I couldn't let anything happen to her! She kicked some alien ass and made it through all right (but not all of her comrades did!). It made it way more fun than I expected.

So I went off the deep end. I started looking for pre-made X-com soldiers. Bob Ross? Velma from Scooby Doo? Yes, please! As long as they were in soldier gear and didn't require any mods I considered them.

Then I ran across the Sarge from Red vs Blue.

I went all in. I was giddy as I looked for voicepacks.

Moses Hightower was my first casualty. He nobly charged out of position to fire a flashbang to protect Matt Murdock after he missed a 90% shot. The "blinded" Advent trooper decided to squint and take a distant pot shot at Hightower with critical results. Hightower made it into cover the next turn but Advent reinforcements must have bribed the random number generator. The Police Academy was robbed of one of it's finest. Westley Snipes got promoted and became my main grenadier in Hightower's place.

Colonel Sanders had a good run, but he never made it to Colonel....

Carrie showed up again, so I recruited her for covert missions. "Guess what, Love!?" I asked. "You're going on a cover mission....with Caboose!"

"Why would you put me in the game just to have me killed!?"

"I needed someone I could trust to keep Caboose out of trouble."

"So he can get me killed instead?"

I'll have you know that Carrie and Caboose have formed a teammate bond. They can give each other a bonus action.

I'm not going to say that neither of them got wounded on any of their escapades....

And now I have another thing I do at night when I should be writing.