I’m not sure how accurate the dating is, but the Steam store page for UFO: Enemy Unknown, or XCOM: UFO Defence as it’s known nowadays, says that the game was released on New Year’s Eve 1994. If you’re one of the few people left in the world that’s never played XCOM I suggest you pick it up immediately while it’s only a quid. It might be slow, and a bit old fashioned, and it might have poor graphics by modern standards, but it’s got it where it counts: in the game play.
My first encounter with the XCOM series came a bit obliquely. Like many of my generation I was far more excited by waht was happening in the world of Sega Megadrive and Nintendo SNES games than in the dusty world of DOS games. Most of my experiences with PC Games had come via a friend’s dad’s dusty old PC2 clone. An ancient Tandy machine that combined the whole computer into a clunky single unit, and the height of gaming technology was four colour CGA graphics and various beeps from the tiny on-board speaker.
No exactly exciting looking is it? As eary games go, it was OK, but my old 8-Bit Atari XE could produce better graphics, and I didn’t have to use arcane keys to control it. To be fair though; Sopwith was already old by the time we were getting into computer games. It first came out in 1984 when home computers were still very much toys for the rich rather than a household appliance.
My first shot of an XCom arrived some time after it had been released. A friend of a friend got involved with our quest to write an RPG and told us about a game he had been playing that would make an awesome RPG. That game was Terror from the Deep: the sequel to XCOM: UFO Defence. It’s essentially the same game, but with the difficulty turned up to eleven and set under the sea instead of on land. I was instantly hooked, and doubly hooked due to the infuriating difficulty curve involved in the game. In fact it would take me over a decade, playing on and off, before I would finally manage to beat the thing. Imagine my horror to discover that the game has a bug where all the difficult settings actually point to the beginner setting. If that’s how difficult it was on the easiest setting. I shudder to think what it would have been like on expert. I expect the aliens would burst out of the screen on that setting and try to take over the world for real.
Buy it.
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