X-Com: UFO Defense

Yuri was breathing heavily, cowering around the corner of the building, trying not to panic. Gudrun had gone into the farmhouse to scout; she said she’d cover him from the roof. And then, the distinctive sound of plasma fire, and the sound of Gudrun screaming. Could he risk a grenade? What if she was still alive? Yuri heard a twig snap, and the little gray bastard walked around the corner. Their eyes locked.

This is X-Com: UFO Defense.

Kate Bush once talked about hearing Pink Floyd’s The Wall album and becoming depressed for the next six months, thinking “Why bother writing any more music? They’ve made the perfect album.” I imagine that other game designers felt that way after playing X-Com for the first time.

You begin X-Com by building a secret base of operations. This introduces the strategic game where you try to develop facilities and technologies to respond to alien incursions and protect the nations funding you. As the game progresses, you might detect alien craft flitting about. Some of them may be on scouting missions, others may be mutilating cattle (really!), or they may be engaged in more nefarious missions.

It’s when you manage to shoot a UFO down that the real game begins. You take a small squad of soldiers, armed to the teeth, to the crash site. Their mission is to kill or capture any aliens present, and to recover alien technology to fuel research.

In the field, one unit moves at a time, based on its initiative. Each unit has so many action points, which can be used for movement, firing a weapon, administering first aid, and so on. If a unit has sufficient initiative left over, it may be able to “interrupt” another’s movement and take a shot at it. There are few feelings more depressing than telling Sgt. Dwight Hudson to peek through a window and watching him take a plasma bolt to the face.

The brilliant thing about the game is when that happens, Dwight is probably dead. Like a strategic version of Counterstrike, combat in X-Com is nasty, brutish, and short. In a lesser game, losing a squad member would make me reload. Somehow X-Com strikes a balance: the soldiers are individuated enough that I feel sad when they die, but disposable enough that I don’t start over just because I lost a few. We’re fighting a terrible enemy. Sacrifices must be made.

As the game progresses, your research will unlock the secrets of the things left on the battlefield – weapons, spaceships, and even the corpses of the enemies themselves. More and different enemies are introduced, and combat becomes even more frantic and less forgiving. The game is a masterpiece of pacing.

The presentation is that of the old British UFO TV series; the art style is half Anime, half Heavy Metal. For a game with no serious moral dilemmas, it is strangely affecting; the first time I saw a cartoon child in Tehran murdered by an alien Enforcer, I was filled with rage.

Rage that kept me playing for hours.

There are a number of versions of X-Com that you can buy. These can be run on modern Windows machines with some degree of difficulty. Gametap says that they will be offering X-Com soon, which might be your best bet if you are not technically inclined.

Yuri screamed, and held the trigger down on his rifle, full auto. He kept shooting the damned thing long after it was dead. Pausing for breath, he reloaded. There couldn’t be that many more of them around.

Could there?