X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown 1994 could never be called a dull year but after packing away my ailing Mega Drive and putting on my finest stripy jumper for Kurt Cobain’s funeral, I needed to be diverted by a great game. Quite fittingly UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-COM came along just as OJ’s white Bronco was trying for orbit. X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown UFO: …
If only games were this difficult these days. I can't actually remember completing this game, but I do remember how bloody hard it was. Terror From The Deep was also good too, but didn't really add much.
And don't know why it wasn't mentioned, but you can relive the X-Com games through Steam for only £2.99 a pop, or £8.99 for the pack.
It became fairly easy after I played it a million times, some of those times being quite recently. I loved it anyway. The secret was to sell almost everything that you recovered from the ground missions, plus a lot of your starting stocks as well. Go straight for heavy plasma, hire 50 soldiers and immediately sack all but the best shooters, then you're ready to kick some alien arse.
I lost so many hours hunting around crash sites looking for the last alien, they were always very good at hiding.
Other highlights were the flying missle tank (urban crash site missions are much easier when you can fly up the outside of buildings) and the hardcore Mars Attacks type alien in the purple cloak who used mind control to wipe out your entire squad in one turn *grrr*.
The underwater sequel never really clicked for me, but the German remake that was around a couple of years ago was a good attempt, shame about the dodgy camera angles.
This XCOM games were brilliant, from a time when gameplay mattered more than graphics.
My favourite tactic late on in the game was to send out hover tanks to recce the alien crash sites. Then using my psionic troopers to make the aliens drop their weapons and then walk them back to my ship where I would line them up and execute them.
Jagged Alliance and Fallout Tactics were also fantastic.
My favourite use of psionics was to scout for other aliens (out of sight) and control them as well so that my Men/Women never had to go anywhere and I could get the aliens to bitch-slap themselves :)
I loved the guideable rocket hovertanks though ... useful with big ships and men with jet-packs.
send the jetpacks to the roof of the big ship, get one man to open the door at the bottom and walk away, a man into the lift shaft to open the door at the top, then leave the ship then rocket grenade from a safe distance into the lift shaft, up to the top, along the open corridor and into the roof/far wall near to my hovering men ... men fly in through the new doorway and waste/capture anyone in that room ...
so many wasted days of my life :)
A pair of troopers carrying blaster bombs - one guided blaster bomb in the side of the alien battleship, and one in the top, then you've got two breaches to launch your assault.
I played this through only a few months ago. Epic, epic game. Apart from Pharaoh and Settlers, I don't think any other game ate up more time. I'm still playing Pharaoh, in fact.
Good times playing X-COM.
Happy times, like reducing an entire city block to smouldering ruins to root out one of those horrible superfast parasite buggers.
And sad times… like having my entire team fire rockets and machine guns into a barn for 6 turns to kill one Sectoid, and failing. I then screamed abuse at my team for failing to hit the broadside of a barn… the fact of the matter is they could hit the barn, evidenced by the fact it had a great many holes in its walls… as well as that it was on fire. They just couldn’t hit the part the nasty little alien was hiding behind.
Insult was added to property damage when the little sod strode out into the open took a long shot at my best agent who was hiding behind a large stone wall and clocked him dead, then proceeded to survive everything I threw at him for another turn before falling unconscious from smoke inhalation.
*sniff* they don’t make games like that anymore.
An absolute classic. The only issue I found, rectified with Terror From The Deep, was the fairly obvious research path.
When I was taking the fight back to Mars I was distressed to find one of the map tile files on the floppy disk was corrupted and made further progress impossible as I couldn't navigate around the flashing blobbyness where they appeared on the map. I had to hack about in a clean tile and make my own replacement. This replacement tile may have been a little more XCOM friendly than the original, especially as I made it a simple straight corridor too narrow for the aliens' hovers to negotiate.
One of my all time favourites, although very difficult to finish at the higher difficulty settings. TftD was also fun but became a bit of a slog after a while because the bases were just so big. A friend of mine, Scott Jones, produced a series of patches mainly aimed at making it even more difficult but I do remember one of them allowed you to play the aliens.
of a great game and series, completely ruined by the publishers being morons.
A series of mediocre sequels, shoehorned into more mainstream formats, died a death and so the publishers buried it. They wouldn't even let the creator/s have the rights to it back.
I keep hoping that it gets properly ressurrected in the form of Rebelstar or Lasersquad, but i have a feeling Hasbro own some of those rights as well.
Honestly, nothing else has come close to this for me - remember firing the demo up on my dads work laptop as a kid, and getting giddy as hell! The only thing that bugged me was that they dropped the laser effect (it sort of blew out a load of pixels on a hit) from the full game, shoulda stayed.
Agree - android version would be immense, though possibly end up with me getting the sack for never working...
I loved and hated this game. It was incredibly hard to get into, but the satisfaction in finishing it...
XCom Apocalypse was an improvement, and the fun I had in having my agents take control of an alien, teleport in, steal his weapons, give him a primed grenade and teleport back out. Oh joy oh bliss.
Other than the Jagged Alliance games, I've seen nothing else that comes even close.
this is crying out for an iPad release??? It'd be epic. Don't change a thing except perhaps update the graphics a bit and make it a "little" easier?? I remember the tension of sending my team into a site, creeping around hunting down those damn aliens but as with others remember I didn't get close to finishing it as it was to flippin hard!!
Have both Enemy Unknown and Terror from the Deep (both PS1), and both played regularly even now; completed EU but could never complete TFTD -still trying and although the graphics look dated, still more than acceptable on my HDTV thro the PS3. Who'd have thunk: gameplay beating shiny graphix
I was just too young for enemy unknown, but I remember seeing the review and getting the demo of TFTD in PC Format (I still have that issue of the mag in the loft somewhere) and salivating over it for months before I could afford to buy the game. I must have played the demo hundreds of times.
I never completed the damn thing until about 2 years ago though, got it loaded up in DosBox and had a great time. It's pretty difficult, although I learned recently that there are a few bugs in the research tree which can catch you out and make it impossible to finish the game, thus adding to the frustration! They may have been patched now, officially or unofficially.
Definitely still one of my all-time favourites though, and when I've finished Settlers 3 I might dig it out again...
Anyone else make the mistake of renaming your soldiers, becoming quite attached to them and getting very upset if they died. I seem to remember if you killed the PC quickly enough after your best guy was shot, it wouldn't save and you could restart the mission!
I'm off to book a couple of days leave and fire up Steam! :-)
Fans of the X-com series might want to check out the turn based strategy games written for the 8-bit machines by the same team (Julian and Nick Gollop):
Rebelstar (1986):
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004058
Rebelstar 2 (1988):
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004061
Laser Squad (1988):
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002813
Well, two actually - Chaos and its sequel, Lords of Chaos. LoC was if anything even better than Laser Squad: you were able to choose the units for your side on the fly and also use a variety of powerful direct attacks and board changing effects, but the more units you had, the less power you had left to use combat spells.
Bought it again on Steam for pennies the other month, thought I'd breeze through it having finished it when it first came out; was quickly and brutally reminded how sodding difficult it is if you are too gung-ho, particularly in the early stages.
Slap some spiffy new graphics on the top of it and re-release it - would be better than YAFPS.
Loved this game, lost loads of sleep, even started dreaming it was really happening! (which is not quite as sad as dreaming about rescuing tiny blue Lemmings with green hair)
Never quite got into intercepter and only recently tried giving apocalypse a proper go (not got far yet, just not *quite* the same feeling, maybe I prefer the turn based aspect rather than the real time bit)
Did get very excited for the Xcom Alliance trailer only to get heartbroken when it never made it to release.
Would love even just a variation of the original game with modern graphics (last time I checked out the fan versions they did at the time seem very much only half finished but that was a long time ago now... any get nearly complete? I will look at the links posted above when home)
Yes please to iOS and Andriod versions (iOS first though please! ;-) )
Chuckle at remebering some of the tackics mentiond above and grimiced at remembering situations where best squad members or whole squads wiped out by one difficult alien ( and yes I did often redo a mission from the previous save point when I had learnt the lesson to create save points just before mission start (in case really horrid layout) and just after! (to avoid losing good squad members)
Could be quite slow to build up your defenses if you don't use the Cheat/patcher to increase starting funds..
Fondly remember playing this for many hours, and enjoying playing it again when I got it off steam. The first was a brilliant game, if very difficult. Terror from the Deep was actually fiendishly difficult, some of those aliens (the crab people and the things that implanted eggs in your guys no matter what armour they were wearing) were ridiculously overpowered. The sense of achievement from beating a mission was immense.
Apocalypse is very enjoyable too - I'm playing that again, and UFO:Afterlight (on Mars) is actually a really good game as well. Aftermath is shoddy and we don't mention any of the other UFO titles, they didn't happen.
I'd love to see this for Android.
sadly the latest 'sequel' looks utterly terrible. lets take an excellent tactical turn based squad shooter, with research and development, and rpg bits, and remake it into what looks like a generic FPS (and it doesnt look like its very good even at that). yay.
TFTD was fun, but very much like EU - the research paths were near identical, iirc.
Apoc was pretty good, and i liked how they progressed the storyline, and kept similar gameplay - whilst updating it for a more modern audience.
interceptor... i quite liked interceptor. theres not many flight sims i like, but the combination of a fun storyline, and the R&D stuff, made it pretty much unique as far as i'm aware.
enforcer... i played once, and it was awful.
now, as for the 'spiritual successors'....
ufo: afterlight/aftermath/aftershock.... not bad games tbh, but didnt have the charm of the originals. also fairly buggy and unresponsive iirc.
a few people have mentioned ones above, which i wont comment on as i've not played them.
i have been playing UFO:Extraterrestrials lately (and a sequel is out soonish), which captures a lot of the the essence of the originals, imo. the feeling of being utterly outclassed is certainly there, along with the research and your squad improving (if they last long enough!). controls are a bit iffy, and theres a few bugs, but nothing gamebreaking.
I'm going to reserve judgement on the new game until closer to the time - BUT, I suspect it would have been far better received than it has been thus far if it wasn't called XCOM.
From what I've read about it (which ain't much yet);
* set in 60's America with that whole "Reds under the bed" kind of thing going on liberally applied to create atmosphere.
* created by the Bioshock 2 team.
* alien invasion (where they can disguise as human) and you can pilfer their tech to research and build upon - it's kinda like XCOM but instead of the turn-based strategy game at landing/terror sites it goes into FPS mode ... at least that's the kind of hint I'm getting about it.
It MIGHT be good but it is going to have to be bloody amazing NOT to get slated because they chose to call it XCOM.
I loved the original - actually preferred "Terror From The Deep" just for the Lobstermen - and bought the whole pack from Steam, I did own the first two originally, ran them on a DX2/66 :) Actually, I owned a game called Laser Squad on the Amiga as well, on which the XCOM games are based (IIRC).
I can't remember what the spec was of the PC I originally saw XCOM running on, but when I finally got hold of it, I played through both EU and TFTD on a 486 DX-33 with 8mb of ram. Which handled things surprisingly well - and in some ways gave me an advantage, as you could figure out how many aliens were left by timing how long the computer's turn took.
(I eventually had to give up on playing TFTD on that machine: it used the same game engine, but with Moore's law having marched on a bit, the developers (the game engine from EU was handed over to an in-house team while the Gollops worked on a more ambitious true sequel) made the levels much bigger and increased the number of aliens, thus increasing the AI-turn time to tea-brewing levels. I returned to it once I'd bought a DX2-50 a few months later. Them were t'days...)
Interestingly, X-com was also available on the Amiga, the CD32 and the Playstation - I've seen the Amiga one running and own both EU and TFTD on the Playstation :)
And there's some nice background history on the series here:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-28-the-story-of-x-com-interview
As regards the new game: it'll be interesting to see the new game, but it ain't X-com. Admittedly, if you squint a little at X-com Apocalypse, you can make something of a case for the 1950's setting being "canon", but I'd peg the main influences of XCOM as Dark Skies (alien invasion series, set in the 1960s), X-Files and Men in Black...
Believe it or not, UFO Enemy Unknown almost made it to the Spectrum.
During the 1990s when the Iron Curtain had fallen and people were building their own Speccy clones, I ran a PD software library and was once sent the preliminary code and part working bits of a very good Spectrum version.
I don't see any good reason why it couldn't have been implemented in 8 bits, though a tape-based version would have been a PITA to work with.
The turn-based gameplay *was* descended from such Speccy greats as Laser Squad and the Rebelstar series, after all, Julian Gollop had a fine history of these turn-based games long before UFO/X-COM.
I remember how addictive this game was, and its turn based nature meant each battle took ages to finish. Being able to research alien technologies and turn them into weapons for your troops gave the game long term appeal. Having a squad of troops that got increased experience and rank as they survived battles was also excellent. I used to love putting down smoke grenades for cover, then having my troops pop out and kill things. I think it would be great if someone did a modern realtime version of this game.
I have xcom running on my ipad. In fact it works perfectly, once you get used to not having a mouse. I did this first by jailbreaking my ipad and downloading and install "dospad" which is a full
dosbox implementation for the ipad. Then, after I updated my ipad, without a jailbreak, I was lucky
enough to see dospad get approved by Apple for about half a day (before it was removed) and installed it. It also runs xcom, but not quite as well, that the graphics do not refresh as quickly,
but it still works. The reason is the jb version allows "cpu=dynamic" ins dospad.cfg, but the "apple"
version does not.
In any case, the sound works, too. Just configure a blaster in dospad.cfg but don't fill in any interrupts for it. It will just work.
Also, you need to download a version of xcom that has been patched, so look for 1.44 I think.
This one will work just fine. I think the steam one can too, just load it into dospad as as well.
TFTDvwill work too. It is the same, but I never played it.
I love playing is on the ipad, but I stopped for some time as I found it was too stressful and
addictive having such a nightmare combination of technology in my hands.
Finally there is also isochron, which will be for the ipad and is a complete rewrite.
For all the above, just google "dospad xcom" "isochron ipad" etc.... exercise left to the reader
I have many happy memories of Friday night UFO sessions, 4 of us grouped around an Amiga 1200HD, cheap alcoholic beverages (mmm, Buckfast...) at the ready, the only light in the room coming from the fuzzy portable TV and blazing fire in the hearth.
We'd play multiplayer by each taking a couple of troops, and spend all night playing until we couldn't stay awake, or the sun came up. When one of our longest serving soldiers was killed in action, we were utterly devastated, and swore to destroy the enemy, to avenge his loss.
Oh, we did. We flew to Mars and kicked alien butt. I remember being a little disappointed by how easy that last battle was, but it was probably just because by then we were a well-organized, well-equipped team of veterans, our strategies finely honed and practiced to perfection. How different from those dark, early days when Sectoids invaded our base and the sparsely equipped crew barely held them off at great cost.
I remember having this on Amiga 1200. It took ages to load levels, was pitifully slow between turns and the graphics were nothing great even for the time. And it was awesome! Entirely absorbing and never dull. Every new advance in tech and every new alien species encountered required a different strategic approach, keeping the game fresh all the way through (a bit like the original 'syndicate').
I was suckered to buying a later PC version, Aftermath... it was slicker, faster and more atmospheric, but the gameplay never quite reached the peaks of 'enemy unknown'
Great memories :)
I had the honour of working with Julian and Nick many years ago in my first games developer job. A little-known fact that Julian told me about X-COM was that there was a bug that meant the difficulty level wasn't saved. So if you started it on the hardest level and came back to it later, the difficulty would be set back to easy.
I suspect this was patched eventually, but it did explain how I managed to do so well on it!
...only in unofficial updates. The bug did have a knock-on effect as it wasn't discovered until after TFTD was released. When developing TFTD, one of the common change requests was "X-COM is too easy," (because of the bug, but they didn't know that) so they made TFTD's LOWEST difficulty setting the equivalent of what was X-COM's HIGHEST difficulty and went UP from there.
Ah the memories. Having my entire squad gathered around a battleship door ready to invade. A mutoid opens the door and is immediately executed, whereupon the alien captain fires a blaster bomb through the open door.
Or the time the stupid pilot landed with an alien exactly astern. One basic grenade was all it took to wipe out the entire team.
I finished it, and yes the final battle was easy, but only because I made the aliens do all the hard work through mind control.
Never did get into TFTD -- too hard, and Apocalypse might have held me longer if I'd switched to turn-based combat, which was available.
I see DOSBOX is available on Android. I've got to give it a go.
If you took control of an alien, you couldn't access their inventory. But, you could open the inventory of one of your men, then use the "next trooper" button to move to the alien.
iirc they had a single clip of ammo, but if you removed it another one appeared. This did cause a problem on at least one occasion, as I clicked on the ammo but didn't actually have enough APs to move it to another location. A new one had appeared and I couldn't put it back, so had to reboot the computer.
Never figured out if you could use it to get infinite ammo - but I did always make a point of having any aliens I controlled drop their weapons...
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