X-COM is your perfect example. It hasn’t been matched yet. I think it’s a combination, not just one thing. In X-COM everything matched, at the time. You had that intro that pumped you up. You had the creept music and robotic whoosing beeping sounds of the interface. Brilliant music. You had different, random(!) terrains, so no mission ever played the same way twice (in fact, if you saved right before landing, even the same mission would seed differently). You had the perfect shady backstory, preying on all the X-Files like discoveries: cow mutilations, shady alien infiltration, mysterious craft, beings, and weapons. You also had what all other games that have come after have not gotten right: fear of the dark. This was primal in X-COM, seeing something moving just outside of the range of vision, and not being able to tell quite what it was. Did you see the hollow black eyes of a Sectoid? Little things like ammo types, which are maybe used to defeat weaknesses in today’s games, were useful in just seeing in X-COM. Not to mention the overall research/,manufacturing game, attaching yourself to soldiers, grace under fire situations, a morale model, psy-attacks, defending yourt own base against raids, setting up income streams (manufacturing, and also selling captured weapons).
Most games that came later took a few parts of X-COM but dropped others. Take Jagged Alliance, which was a terrific game in its own right. It was great tactically, strategically, and atmospherically (comic relief from the individual mercs). But it lacked the urgency of X-COM, the big threat. It also lacked that primal fear and the base management aspect (though it did have the conquering territory aspect, which wouldn’t work in the X-COM story).
The game I look on with nostalgia, hoping for a remake, is X-COM3, aka X-COM: Apocalypse. What turned me off about that game was the cheery look, the retro style (some people liked it but I thought it too cartoony), and the horrible look of the aliens. I think if you changed the look of the aliens and added a night cycle the game would have become a huge hit. You’d add back in that primal fear of the dark, of mysterious dangerous things. You can’t have it be dark all the time, but you need to build suspense somewhat.
Think about X-COM3 - you had a fully destructible cityscape. Buildings (or part of buildings) collapse. Freeways tumble over. Police chase criminals, irrespective of that you do. When an organization makes a delivery, an actual delivery truck races across the city. Starships take off and land in the port. Add to this the entire city is randomized, every new game. Now take the tactical: fully destructible interiors . . . way better than in X-COM. Take out the four support structures of a tower, and the whole thing collapses. Way, way, better modelled than almost any game today in 3D. Fire can spread on flammable surfaces. Smoke obscures vision and can make people unconcious. I mean, I can’t imagine how good that game would be today set in a dark, rainy (but not always, sometimes the sun shines) Blade Runner city. Where civilians run away as you fight it out in a shopping mall.
How many other games let you fight aliens in shopping malls, sports arenas, police stations, hospitals, warehouses, car factories, munitions factories, and the Senate?
Games today liek Silent Storm are great physics wise, but just can’t match in scope and mood.