Classic GOTW: X-Com UFO Defense

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IMAGE(http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/images/ufo2.jpg)

I was 13 in 1993 when X-Com was released -- go ahead and take a moment to feel old if you like. I was young, impressionable, and armed with a PC ready to devour an endless stream of game demos. I was playing the field, not really looking for a commitment, and then I found the XCom demo, and suddenly I was no longer a boy. I was a man. With a gun. Fighting aliens.

Every day after school I rushed home to feed the obsession, playing the demo level again and again. Though the layout never changed, somehow the game managed to offer me a new challenge with every play session. This time the floating purple alien would fire at me from a second story window, and the next time he'd lurch out of an alley. It was deliciously unpredictable, and the game was immediately infused with the kind of paranoia that became its defining characteristic, and my love for gaming on the PC was solidified.

With a spooky soundtrack, full research trees, base building, recruiting and turn-based gameplay that holds up even today, X-Com is a classic. Many developers have tried to revisit the formula for fun and profit, yet none have managed the perfect balance achieved by the original.

Comments

Don't forget the fully destructible environment

OHHH YES !!!

Here is my personal story with the game. I read the review on a mag and thought it would be cool. Went to a store that had import games, (rare at that time). I saw it and it was even in CD (also rare at that time). I looked at the price, (around 80euros) that was like 3 times more expensive at that time than normal PC games. I didn't doubt it, had the money even thought I was young, and it was my all best buy.

Had so much fun with it, still. XCOM Forever.

I was in my second year of college...I remeber getting an XCom demo CD with some long forgotten game mag months before the game came out. All you got was one city combat instance but all your crew had flying power armor. I must have played that demo at least once a day until the game came out and I managed to save up enough spare change to buy it. My second all-time favorite game ever next to Fallout. I actually still have it installed on my laptop running in DOSbox. SQUEE!

I used to play it over at a friend's house and when walking home in the dark late at night the shadows seemed just a bit more alive. It's the only game I can recall that has managed to take its atmosphere, its paranoia, and still get an emotional response well after it's turned off.

Sure, I was also young and impressionable but still a great feat.

This is my all time favorite game. I still don't understand why terror from the deep was brought to steam but x-com wasn't.

I was only ok at the battles, I was too cautious and nervous when I first played it. I was however great at the base building and financial. So a friend and I took turns. I would do everything but fight the aliens and he would fight and kill the aliens. I made sure his squads had all the material they needed and that there were lots of them. We beat the game that way and it was some of the most fun I had ever had.

I own the game still, but it plays poorly under windows. I have the old dos version.

I actually was playing it again a few days ago and decided to get a little happy with the High Explosive charges. I doubt the citizens of Buenos Aires appreciated it.

This is one of the few games that I've gone back to, and still enjoyed the experience. A great, great game.

This is one of the best Games ever made. I don't remember how old I was when I got it. Young enough to have to ask my Dad to get it after I fished it out of the software bin at KB Toys, because the box was cool. This is probably one of the only times that a cool box actually equaled a cool game for me. I love this game.

I cant figure out why that such a well loved game couldn't be remade with any success. I was always a 'spiritual' successor, they turned out to be disappointing.

Word on the Street is 2K acquired the rights to it. I hope with all my little gamer heart that they make the poop out of this game.

Dead on pick Certis!

Rat Boy wrote:

I actually was playing it again a few days ago and decided to get a little happy with the High Explosive charges. I doubt the citizens of Buenos Aires appreciated it.

Honest and true. I'm sure the residents of Paris weren't thrilled when I started using those Guided Mega-Bomb things to level every and anything that looked like an Alien.

It's been almost 15 years, and what astonishes me most, is that noone has managed to do the things this game did quite so well. Many have tried. Either the combat's wonky or they're lacking the wonderfully destructive environments and so on and so on. It's one hell of a statement about the game.

Burton wrote:

Word on the Street is 2K acquired the rights to it. I hope with all my little gamer heart that the make the poop out of this game.

Further word on the street is that a certain friend of this site is working on it.

What took you so long?

This is the one Robear gave me a heads up on back in the day. We both ordered from some England, an on-line game store. I've come back to it thru the years and always enjoyed it. Super game.

I'm still playing this game. Here's a personal story, as it seems this games just brings them up:

In the second year of college I was playing UFO: Enemy Unknown (that's how we Europeans call it) so much that my shoulder muscle went sore, became almost immobilized and ached like hell. The doctor prescribed me muscle relaxants, painkillers and (hooray!) three days out of school. Of course, with muscle relaxants and painkillers I could play on for three days straight. I actually broke a mouse button during playing and since this game is useless without mouse, I took out my soldering iron, an old Russian microswitch from Russian keyboard and soldered it in instead of the broken one (at that time, mice were expensive and I was a penniless student). It was big and needed much more pressure to click (and also was loud) but man, was it heavy-duty. A while later I replaced the second button as well and that mouse became virtually indestructible.

Of course, I had the game pirated, as there were no gameshops at that time in my country. When I had the chance, I bought both floppy European version, boxed and all and a while later a CD one with US version, as a sort of repentance for the sin of piracy. The game deserves it, I love it. I'm so sad that no X-COM/UFO game afterwards caught up with the ingenuity of the first one.

I first played this game only a few years ago while on vacation. It was a blast! Brutal and a bit lacking in some modern UI fineries, but it definitely held up.

Prederick wrote:

It's been almost 15 years, and what astonishes me most, is that noone has managed to do the things this game did quite so well. Many have tried. Either the combat's wonky or they're lacking the wonderfully destructive environments and so on and so on. It's one hell of a statement about the game.

Sad but true. Also sad that you spelled "noone" as one word.

X-Com is one of a handful of games that have achieved a permanent place on my hard drive. It plays perfectly under DosBox.

I also played it in my second year of Uni. I renamed all my soldiers to my fellow students, and made decisions on who should go point around a corner into someone's opportunity fire based on how much I liked them (and, I'm slightly ashamed to say, how technical their degree was). A few people got angry for me when I didn't choose them. Well, them's the breaks, I'm afraid. Lawyers, classicists and English scholars go first. Great times.

This is the game that made me a PC Gamer. It and Alpha Centauri have probably killed more of my time than should really be mentioned.

Hmm... never played it. Where might one aquire a copy that would run on a modern PC?

Serengeti wrote:

Hmm... never played it. Where might one aquire a copy that would run on a modern PC?

Head quietly over to Home of the Underdogs and pretend that it's legal to get it from there. Also, their version should run under WinXP with no problems.

One of the first games that actually made me return to previous saves because a specific squad member died. I had such an attachment to my squad I couldn't even start to fathom going through a mission without them. Plus, it was also fun naming a guy after me and making him a supremer bad ass.

I still play this ALL. THE. TIME.

I currently use the version from the Underdogs. It has a second exe that loads a patch into memory and lets it run.

It made my super-crappy work laptop into something useful on the road.

Very nice pick.
Even with the best weapons researched, my whole squad carried laser rifles as backups. No ammo required.
And when those flying battle suits came along, well, you didn't want to be an alien on the other side of the door of my properly stacked, symmetrical and inward facing human pyramid of doom.
Also, the game put Emilio Estevez in my ranks.

Certis wrote:

I was 13 in 1993 ... I found the XCom demo, and suddenly I was no longer a boy. I was a man.

So, it was your Bar Mitzvah?

deftly wrote:

It made my super-crappy work laptop into something useful on the road.

My next 2 week work trip is suddenly looking up...

YES!

OK now I get to add my sappy anecdotes to the thread. My freshman year of college I bought this game after a friend twisted my arm. We proceeded to make my roomate completely miserable as we played it through the night, night after night (on my awesome Gateway 486). We would switch out playing and offering advice as the other guy got tired. We also would lend it to other people and watch them play their own games.

Eventually and very sadly what ruined the game for me was when my friend, who was just then getting into hex editing, hacked our guys stats to make them Ubermenchen. When you've played the game like that it's hard to go back - and playing Rise of the Supermen made the game so much less about gutwrenching agony and so much like a bad Rambo sequel.

Today I'd like to play the exact same game with updated graphics and of course the ability to tie weapons and equipment to a squadmember without having to reassign it every mission. I've looked at Afterlight with interest but the art direction is too dissimilar. It's not nostalgia, I just like those kind of turn-based squad tactics games and that was such a beautiful example of the genre.

ps. I love you Certis. Have my manchild.

I'll simply add that I too loved this game. To this day it is still loaded on my laptop.

And, yes, I feel old; considering that I was [size=1]35[/size] in 1993.
Hey, you whippersnappers! Get offa my LAN!

I had a friend loan this to me back in high school. I'd play it on weekends to the wee hours of the night in my basement. The music was so eerie, I'd freak out a little when half a dozen shots came out of nowhere, and my troopers morale dropped like a rock and they started freaking out themselves. Or when you send a guy to look around a corner, and 2 feet away from him is a chryssalid and you just know he's gonna be impregnated in 30 seconds.

Come to think of it, I still have the cd.

As far as the successors to it go, UFO : Aftermath isn't a bad spiritual successor. It's not great, and it doesn't have quite the same ambiance as the original, but it gets the job done.

How come every game journalism site is singing the praises of X-Com at the moment?

Definately a classic. It says a lot about the game that every year people still start AAR's for it on game message boards and people line up to be part of it.

I really really hope the Irrational/2K rumors about a sequel are true.

In the meantime, the free UFO: Alien Invasion game is a decent substitute, incomplete and beta status that it is.

I upgraded, and a friend bought an entire new 486-33 just to run this game, based purely on the demo. It was that good.

We played it obsessively for months; the demo was only a taste of the greatness of the full product.

Interestingly, though, I didn't actually complete the game until fairly recently. I kept running into the research bug and always got stuck.

The first half of Silent Storm is the only game to approach X-Com in terms of tactical combat with destructible-environment goodness; sadly, the second half of that game is a total mess.