UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-Com: UFO Defense, if you’re not English).
For those of you who don’t know it, it’s an inspired mix of turn-based tactical battles and real-time management. Made in 1993 by Julian Gollop (of Mythos Games), and published by MicroProse, it came along at the time when most of my contemporaries were playing Doom or Super Mario All-Stars, and it single-handedly made me realise that games could be more than just about twitch responses: you had to think in some games. You had to plan!
(Now, I’m not suggesting that UFO: Enemy Unknown was the first game where you had to use your brain and not just your reactions. I know there were plenty of others before it. But it’s the first one I played.)
Now, the basic premise is as follows: it’s 1999, and over the past year, UFOs have started appearing everywhere, stealing livestock and people, mutilating cattle and terrorising major cities. The governments of the world create (and co-fund) X-Com: the eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit. You (the player) are put in charge of running X-Com, and saving the world from the alien threat!
The gameplay takes place in two modes: first up is the Geoscape, which is in realtime, and which is where you do research, manufacture weapons and other materials, buy and sell stuff, hire soldiers, scientists and mechanics, build X-Com bases and monitor Earth’s skies for UFOs. When you find a UFO, you send aircraft to intercept it and shoot it down, which then initiates a combat mission.
Combat missions are turn-based, isometric affairs in which your soldiers search the area around the crash site for aliens, and kill them.
One of the things I like most about the game is the way it tells the story. At the beginning of the game, all you know is what I’ve said above: aliens are attacking and you’ve got to stop them. But as the game goes on, you bring alien corpses, UFOs, weapons and sometimes even live aliens back from combat missions. If you research these things, you learn more and more about the alien society and technology, and you piece together a very interesting story stretching way back into the past. You find out the story for yourself, and each hard-won piece of information really does feel like something you’ve personally achieved (though in fact, all you’ve done is press some buttons to allocate resources). It’s such a different approach from the typical ‘linear level followed by cutscene followed by linear level followed by cutscene…’ way games tell their stories, and it’s so effective. It surprises me that a game made sixteen years ago has a better narrative method than most games made today.
So, UFO: Enemy Unknown was pretty popular, and Microprose wanted a sequel sharpish. They made X-Com: Terror From The Deep, which is, for all intents and purposes, a missions pack for the first game. The gameplay is exactly the same (but a bit harder), the only real differences being that it now takes place under the sea and that the weapons and craft are different. It’s still an excellent game (in fact, there are good arguments for it being better than the first one) but I prefer Enemy Unknown.
Again, TFTD did rather well, and a ‘true’ sequel, X-Com: Apocalypse was release in 1997 (made by the Gollop brothers, who hadn’t worked on TFTD). This did less well, but still well enough to ensure a couple more sequels: Enforcer and Interceptor.
Anyway, I bought all the above X-Com games on Steam. The only one I’ve played since then, though, is Enemy Unknown (my plan being to complete that one, then play Terror From The Deep).
Yesterday, I realised I’ve never played any of the others, except a demo of Apocalypse when it came out.
So I figured I’d give them a try.
Apocalypse is baffling – I can’t make out what I’m supposed to do. There’s just a view of a city. I can’t tell if I’m in a mission or if that’s the equivalent of the Geoscape from Enemy Unknown. I need to spend a lot more time with it to figure stuff out (since there’s no manual with the Steam versions of the games).
The other two are utter shit. Enforcer is a dreadful third-person shooter, complete with really annoying voice-over from a mad scientist. The aiming’s appalling and the speed and responsiveness are far too low. Interceptor is the same, but with a spaceship instead of a soldier. There’s research to do, apparently, but I was so bored with the whole thing that I couldn’t be bothered to check it out properly. It’s no wonder the series stopped making money.
The moral of the story is this: stick to the first two games. (With a caveat that Apocalypse might be good if I can figure it out).
Interestingly, 2K released the X-Com games on Steam. This is interesting for two reasons: firstly, it means that 2K definitely have the rights to the brand (there was confusion and wrangling for a while). Secondly (and more importantly), there are rumours going around that Irrational Games (now 2K Boston/2K Marin) are working on an unannounced game which is actually a new X-Com title.
I used to work at 2K and so I still know a bunch of people there. Unfortunately, they value their jobs too much to tell me anything about this mythical sequel. However, I know that several people at 2K are X-Com fanatics like me, so if they are working on a new X-Com game, there are people who’ll steer the right course.
But what is the right course? A straight remake (like the new Colonization) would be good, but it wouldn’t add anything except better sound and graphics. On the other hand, change too much and you end up pissing off your fan-base. So they’re going to have to make something the same, but different. Not an easy task. Altair Interactive couldn’t do it with their UFO series: combat was good, but the research/base management side wasn’t up to scratch.
