It's a bit weird for me to be writing this so many years after the game was released (1994), but with the recent release of UFO: Aftermath a lot of people are writing me and asking what's so great about the X-COM franchise. Well, I'll tell you straight-up: the original X-COM: UFO Defense (a.k.a. UFO: Enemy Unknown in the U.K. and elsewhere), hereafter referred to simply as X-COM, was one of the best video games ever made. Though big strides have been made in overall production values since its release, there are precious few games that provide anything like its depth or degree of fun. Even today you can't go wrong picking up a copy, if you can find one and get it to run, for reasons I'll try to make clear.
For its day, X-COM looked great. It featured 320 x 200 color graphics as did many other titles of that era. All of the artwork and animation was hand-drawn and impressively detailed. X-COM's sprite-based images don't hold a candle to today's bazillion-polygon, bump-mapped, shaded environments and models, but they were (and still are) good enough to convey the relevant information. Even today—I still play the game sometimes when I can get it to work on my system—the graphics provide positively visceral disappointment when one of my long-time squaddies gets wasted by some alien scum.
If the visuals were great, the audio was superb. Granted, it was the era of the Adlib card and the basic 8-bit Soundblaster, but the soundtrack was positively creepy. Playing late at night with the lights down, one could actually be scared by hearing the clicking sounds of a Chryssalid coming to impregnate some unsuspecting X-COM trooper. All of the sound effects were great and the music was fabulous. Frankly, even though the game supports sending the music to MIDI devices, I think the original Adlib/Soundblaster sounds are the best. Sure, FM-synthesized drums sound pretty crappy, but the final result is better than the sum of its parts.
The interface was pretty good. The basic menu structure was just fine, and for such a complex game the rest worked pretty well. Where the interface really could have benefited from some slight refinements was with the real-time tactical portion of the game. It was possible, for example, to set troops to reserve enough time in their movements and actions to kneel, to fire an aimed shot, etc. But these settings were lost at the end of every turn! The result was that the gamer constantly had to reset his preferences for each soldier at the start of each turn, which was incredibly annoying to say the least. In this respect the first official sequel, X-COM: Terror from the Deep, was a big improvement, though it fell short in other respects. There was no facility for changing key bindings or anything like that, but the interface was still good for its day.
This is where X-COM rocked and rocked hard, because it melded so many elements so perfectly. The game could ultimately be divided into two realms: strategic and tactical. On the strategic side of the fence, the player had to make all kinds of important decisions about where to build bases to keep the funding coming from various contributing nations; what facilities to build at said bases; which aircraft to buy and/or build; how many scientists, engineers, and troops to hire for each base; which projects to research and how many scientists to assign to them; which items to produce and how many engineers to assign to the tasks; which aircraft to commit to various incidents while holding back a reserve in case the aliens were using a feint; etc.
On the tactical side of the fence, the player had to make all kinds of important decisions including how to "grow" troops (their stats changed depending upon how they were used during the real-time combat missions); which weapons, armor, and other useful devices to buy, build, or equip; how to deploy the troops in the field, keeping firing arcs and other military concepts in mind; how to use and/or reserve the time units available to each soldier to maximize their effective threat while minimizing risk; how to deal with the unavoidable psionic attacks that various aliens would surely launch; etc. Because of the wide variety of environments involved in investigating downed alien spacecraft, repelling terror attacks in major cities, attacking enemy bases, etc., the tactical game was just as complex and interesting as the strategic game.
And better still, the two realms were nicely interconnected. Choosing to build more bases with good radar means more and better intercepts, which means more information is available on which the commander can draw when deciding what to do with the troops. The choice of where each X-COM base facility is built really matters because you'll be dealing with that exact layout if the aliens ever attack. I can remember making poor choices about where to put the flight hangars, for example, and ending up in some nasty firefights as a result of giving the aliens too many directions from which to flank my troops. In short, all of the decisions made in the strategic game flowed nicely into the tactical game, providing the player with an experience unmatched by any other game I've played to date.
Truly, X-COM was forward thinking for its day insofar as it it brought so many elements together in one game. It even featured lighting effects and fully-destructible buildings and other objects for crying out loud; how many games made today can say the same?! The strategic and tactical possibilities supplied by the X-COM game mechanics haven't been rivaled by any other game I've played since, and that's a shame.
The story, though somewhat hackneyed by now, was still relatively fresh at the time. The basic premise of an alien invasion was hardly new, mind you, but the way X-COM brought together so much of the myth and folklore surrounding UFOs was brilliant. As time progresses, the player learned more and more about the aliens' activities, seeing a singular and malevolent purpose emerge from the whole. From the initial discoveries of cattle mutilations and such to the final understanding of the alien threat and the link to Mars, the various bits of the story come together wonderfully. By the end of the game, the player really does feel like he's saved the world, or at least the digital world of X-COM.
The game was surely no slouch in this department either. X-COM featured a large cast of interesting and scary aliens, a wealth of different environments in which to face them, several different aircraft to work with, dozens of different types of weapons, dozens of different projects to research, lots of different sorts of base facilities, and a lot of gameplay for any single campaign. Even on the easiest levels, it could take me weeks of play to complete a single game. And unlike most other games, I came back to X-COM again and again and again.
The most I've ever played through any other game completely can be counted on two hands. Since the game's release, I've finished more than a dozen run-throughs of X-COM, and it's still fresh and fun even today. That's a huge testament to the great variety of content in the game. The only negative thing I can say about the game is that it lacks a nice ending video, providing only a short, victory slide show instead. It would have been really nice to have a neat editing video to complement the neat opening video.
There was no multi-player aspect to the game, though various play-by-mail schemes arose. As such, there's little more to be said here.
My greatest gaming-related wish is that some developer will someday remake X-COM and do it right, for the various sequels have sadly been less and less interesting over time. X-COM: Terror from the Deep was so clearly an attempt to cash in on the unexpected popularity of the original game that it was little more than a thin rehash in an aquatic setting. X-COM: Apocalypse was much improved visually and audibly, but its focus was on a single city, and, as such, it lost much of the charm of the original in translation. X-COM: Interceptor was yet another big step forward visually and audibly, but it completely replaced the on-the-ground tactical game with the most ridiculously twitchy spacecraft flight engine I've ever seen. In short, it was largely impossible to have any fun with. Other more promising looking sequels (e.g., X-COM: Alliance) were cancelled in favor of utterly useless dreck (e.g., X-COM: Enforcer) that bore no resemblance to the original game save for its use of 'X-COM' in the title and its inclusion of aliens in the mix.
Which brings us back to the present. It looks like UFO: Aftermath is the next true sequel to the original game, in spirit at least, though it apparently elides several of the more interesting features of the original game. The demo looks promising, and I'm thinking pretty seriously about picking up a copy of the game. My hope is that someday we'll have a game worthy of being called X-COM 2, and I suppose it's possible that UFO: Aftermath is that game. I don't know that yet. What I do know is that the X-COM is one of the best video games ever made, if not in fact the best video game as more than a few have claimed (e.g., IGN).
10/16/2003