I’m taking a look at X-Com to try to figure out what made it so compelling. I ran it for the first time in about 6 years, and I’ll be damned if it still doesn’t grab and hold my attention. What made X-Com so great? Here are a few possibilities:
Fear of unknown technology. You never knew what you’d face when you got out in the field, and it seemed like the aliens were always at least three steps ahead of you.
Fear of what may be behind you. For an isometric game, the line of sight really helped create tension.
Alien autopsies. :-)
For those of you who liked or disliked X-Com, what are your thoughts? Was it a good squad-level strategy game, or have you played better?
What I loved about X-Com was:
The lighting model, the height model, the world model, the research model, the time model, the sheer delight of discovering the aliens were invading your base, and you were fighting in your base.
Then realizing that every grenade was tearing apart your base.
And it had a story that revealed itself through your actions.
For me that game did one thing better then any game has before or since;
It set up expectations in the player, then surpassed them time and time again.
X-Com is still on my laptop. I think all of the factors mentioned so far contributed to my enjoyment along with the almost RPGish attachment I could make to my troops with their names and unique skills and growing expertise. As a roleplayer I find there’s very little real drama in games in which the main characters are always going to be alright and, if they die, you have to reload and retry to continue the game. Being able to play through and recover from setbacks is important not only in strategy games or dynamic simulations but in roleplaying too.
Aside from the RPGish elements it’s the incredibly tight interweaving of the strategic and the tactical considerations. Every time you touched the keyboard in a tactical situation you may well effect a change in the game-state that could alter your larger strategies. Lose guys, waste ammo, kill aliens, find technology, make a site secure or lose it? All of this feeds into the strategic game when you’re hiring, requisitioning, researching, forming and equipping assault teams, and looking for funding. Where you build bases, what you build into bases, and which missions you take on, or are able to take on, shape how the game will play out and which countries will continue supporting you. And this all feeds into how combat effective your team will be and how many teams you’ll have available.
It’s a very tight package filled with surprises, yes exceeded expectations, ambience (graphics and sound), and drama. And truly dynamic gameplay.
I loved X-Com. I used to work at a computer store and I borrowed it for a long weekend. My friend was also visiting from out of town and we were supposed to go out and see people, etc. Well, after I showed him the game we sat there from Friday night until Monday playing. Next to no sleep and only the odd food break.
If someone was able to bring back that feeling I’d buy that game in a hearbeat.
I really want to hear from the people who disliked it. They need to be ferreted out and hung upsidedown, naked in the town square for all to see and laugh at.
I had never played a game with line of site like that as I was a console guy back then. It definitely built tension alond with the simple, elegant score. That was my first PS game and is still my favorite.
Base management…RPGish…turnbased battles…What’s not to like?
Hmmm the war may have just started and I lost my train of thought.
Sorry Laralyn. I’ll get back to you. :) [size=2]BTW, What’re you wearin’?[/size]
I didn’t play X-Com when it was new. I think I got the full game off an old CGW CD and tried playing it but it ran too fast (there’s that part of the game that’s in real time) and I didn’t bother to muck around with Mo-Slo. If this game’s so all-fired great they should rerelease it for $15 with a new windows installer and properly slowed gameplay…
X-Com is absolutely sainted over at the GoneGold forum, I know that. The only games that get anywhere near the acclaim of X-Com over there, are Thief, Fallout and PS: Torment.
There was one simple touch that really made the fights great. The aliens seemed to have a larger line-of-sight radius and thus spotted your squaddies before they could spot the aliens. That was enough to force the player to be much more cautious and even with caution, that edge for the aliens still resulted in plenty of casualties for the player.
If you play the game with Scott Jones X-COM util (which fixes the difficulty level bug) and play on the hardest setting, you have to use smoke grenades liberally to provide cover for your squaddies to survive.
Man, I still remember the first time I saw one of those badass muton guards in my first game of X-COM. After fighting the evil little grays and the nasty snakemen, seeing the alien stormtroopers for the first time was like whoa, I know these guys are going to be a handful.
I also remember my first chrysalid. It ran up touched one of my guys on the ramp of my ship. It set off a chain reaction of mutations among my squaddies. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. (And that’s a good reason to not know too much about these games before you play them. Nowadays you’d know all about the different aliens before the game ever shipped.)
Infogrames did put out a version with a Windows installer. I can’t remember if it included a way to slow the game down, though. You can get utilities to do that. The other thing you might consider is just trying to grab a used computer for $100 or so to play some of the old classics.
Infogrames did put out a version with a Windows installer. I can’t remember if it included a way to slow the game down, though. You can get utilities to do that. The other thing you might consider is just trying to grab a used computer for $100 or so to play some of the old classics.[/quote]
The Windows version does indeed slow the game down to playable levels. It’s part of the X-Com Collector’s Edition and should still be available (it was $15 when I bought mine).
I felt that X-Com was the only game that really dealt in a reasonable way with problems that our world could potentially face in the future. Where would aliens possibly establish a base? Near the Azores. It’s interesting how that has so much relevance today with regard to other issues.
X-Com made me realize that some day, women would be called upon to fulfill crucial roles in combat units. I liked how you had to make armor rather than finding it, so that it was obvious that you were making armor to fit people individually, instead of finding it in crates and somehow it magically fit everyone in your squad if they needed it. This is the kind of stuff role-playing game designers don’t seem to think about, and it just shows how politically backward these so-called “developers” are when it comes to things that actually matter to the people who buy their games.
Something that I’ve always loved about the X-Com games as well as the Jagged Alliance games and others like them is the ability to micro-manage your inventory and your squads.
I spent hours in both games simply making sure that my inventory of weapons and other items were spread out around the various bases/sectors and making sure my squads were balanced.
What?! I’m a wacko? No way. Inventory management should have a game all by itself. Call it Inventory Tycoon.
That has always really interested me. How could you compel a player to keep playing after his favorite character dies (in a squad-based setting)? And by “compel” I don’t mean any kind of ridiculous crap like not allowing saves. They kill well-loved characters in books, movies and television all the time, and people keep watching/reading to see what happens next. Why are games not the same?
You can also click on the ? button during combat to choose a slower movement/scrolling speed. I assumed it was running too quickly until I realized I had control over it. Duh. :roll:
I remember finishing my first game of X-Com. Talk about an epic battle on Mars. I went in with about 12 elite squaddies, veterans of countless alien skirmishes. The ultimate battle survivors.
I packed along tons of those guided missiles and just laid waste to the surface, losing about 4 guys before I was able to find the pyramid with the elevator shaft down.
Then the second half of the battle was truly the stuff of legend. Grenades and missiles going off everywhere. Aliens and squaddies in desperate close-quarters battle. I finally ran out of missiles, and was down to my last two squaddies (the team leaders, the best of the best, the ones with the best stats, most kills, etc). Both of them were wounded and I had lost my squaddies with medkits, so they were literally going to bleed to death if I didn’t win fast.
I finally get them into this long corridor, and they go up a lift, and bingo, there’s the brain. Took out the three Etherials guarding it in a wild plasma melee, and then that was it. I had won.
[ol]
[li]interesting and fairly open-ended strategic and tactical level games. You were free to choose where to set up your bases, what events to respond to, what to research, etc. in the strategic level. Of course the tactical level presented all kinds of options as well – there were many possible strategies for equipping your characters, and completing a mission.
[/li][li]initial lack of information in both of those scopes (no knowledge about alien motives/craft in strategic mode, limited FOV in tactical mode, no knowledge about what weapons the aliens are vulnerable to, etc.), which adds to that delightful tension.
[/li][li]RPG-lite character development. I made sure to rename troops who were good at something so I knew to try to keep them alive. :D Also made you more pissed off when someone “special” died.
[/li][li]Unpredictability, particularly panicking as well as the enigmatic tactical enemy AI.
[/li][li]wide variety of bugs to smash, goodies to loot, and technology to research.
[/li][li]perfect subject matter for this kind of game. It’s something to which everyone can relate.
[/li][/ol]
One question…am I correct in reading above that there was a PlayStation version? How odd!
Games are interactive, so it’s going to depend a lot on the value of that individual character to the ongoing gameplay.
X-Com got away with it because “you” weren’t your squad. Or more precisely, you were the sum of your squad. I was often more saddened by the loss of a robot then a human… (Those robots were expensive, but they were worth every penny.)
Beyond your name, and their skills, your squaddies were pretty interchangable. It was X-Com itself, and the survival of the human race that mattered most.
In addition to all the praise points already raised, there’s one that I think X-Com really nailed–and that was the difficulty curve over the course of the game.
The first months of game-time were simply grim, and got worse. Attrition in the squad was high, and then got worse as you ran into aliens with psi. Funding got desperate as you scrabbled to get interceptor and radar coverage before other world areas pulled their funding; terror missions let you know you were on the razor edge of losing a nation. You were in a downhill slide.
But you also had a sense of progress, with great milestones. Slowly at first, the downhill slide shallowed, bottomed out, and you began to climb, and every step was joy. Plasma weaponry, increasing e-115 stockpiles from capturing huge intact ships, flying power armor, the snickering joy in just obliterating landing sites without ever stepping out of the deployment vehicle.
I was very saddened when Dreamland got canceled. I’m really hoping for an updated true sequel to the original.
