Just last week, I was surprised to find that I’d received a gift over Steam (Valve’s online PC gaming platform) of X-COM: Enemy Unknown, a re-imagination of one of my favorite old games, X-COM: UFO Defense. I took a liking to it right away, but I thought for the blog that I’d take a look back at why the original was so good.
X-COM: UFO Defense was released all the way back in 1994. Originally known as UFO: Enemy Unknown, the game received widespread critical and public success (yes, there was a time when that above image looked good). The game casts the player as commander of the newly founded X-COM project, humanity’s first line of defense against the impending alien invasion. It is your job to equip, train, and tactically coordinate your soldiers to respond to alien incursion, as well as allocate resources for researching the alien menace in an attempt to combat it.
What you’re looking at now is the game’s main screen: the geoscape. This allows the player to do all the behind-the-scenes work behind the X-COM project: detect UFO activity, prioritize the research your scientists do, and dispatch forces to deal with alien threats. X-COM displays one of the greatest qualities unique to video games: it’s organic. No game of X-COM is exactly the same as any other. UFOs of random types appear in random places for random missions. Sometimes you can have multiple UFO missions in one day, and other times you’ll go weeks of in-game time without seeing one. Encounters themselves are also extremely varied, and differ depending on where in the world you are. It could be rural farmland, a major city, an arctic tundra, or a desert.
X-COM is another game that manages to be challenging but also fun. You start off facing an enemy you don’t quite understand, with severely inferior weaponry and soldiers barely out of boot camp, but as you go along your force will become stronger. As you research new technology, your soldiers will start to get better, but so will the aliens’, who will also adjust both their strategies and tactics according to your weaknesses. The enemy is smart: if you start shooting down too many of their UFOs, they’ll try to find your base and destroy it. As you get stronger, they also get stronger, sending out more powerful aliens of all different kinds to face you, and using the terrain to their advantage more. X-COM can be a difficult battle, but it is nevertheless an extremely satisfying one.
Perhaps one of my favorite things about X-COM is the conversations I have with others who have played it. Since every scenario is unique, everyone will have stories about the time they used some clever tactic to outwit the enemy, or the time their soldiers just couldn’t hit a shot, or the time in which they first encountered the Chryssalids (you’re in for a surprise if you ever play the game). X-COM is great because the final result of the game is one uniquely your own, shaped by all the little choices you made throughout the course of the game. There’s a unique connection there that no other game can really match for me, and which lets me pick the game up again and again without getting bored. Check it out if you can, and if you’re a fan of strategy games.
@Patrick: Final Fantasy, yes. Fire Emblem, no. From what I know this game is far more similar to the latter than the former, because the way you position yourself relative to other units is a very important factor in how the game plays out.
@Riley: I would say so. There are scripted tutorial sequences, but for the most part it’s still a set of randomly generated events, managing resources, etc. It’s also a lot more intuitive than the old X-COM, so it’s more accessible. The original has no tutorial, so you more or less have to figure out how everything works either through reading a manual, or simple trial and error (which is what I did).
I really enjoy how in-depth this game was for only being made in ’94. The fact that each encounter with the aliens were always different is pretty impressive. Things like becoming stronger to take out stronger enemies gives it some great replay value. The only X-COM that I’ve seen was the latest one. Does it stay true to the original style?
Sorry about my naivety on video games, but this looks somewhat like World of Warcraft. I remember my roommate playing this for days at a time on weekends, and so this looks somewhat like that! Again, the graphics are a bit poor, but I guess for being released in the 1990s, this is stellar graphics!
I vaguely remember playing X-COM, but I’m pretty sure the newer one, Enemy Unknown received a pretty impressive amount of awards at E3 last year…something like 20 awards. Anyways, from what I remember X-COM was a turn-based strategy, which brings me to my question, did you ever play any Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem games?