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Both the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 500 versions of UFO:Enemy Unknown are uncompletable due to bugs. The US release (under the X-Com: UFO Defense title) reportedly fixes this, but is extremely rare, possibly unreleased.
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Ten years after the game was released, a real element 115 was discovered. Unfortunately, it wasn't named elerium like in the game, but ununpentium.
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There was a "Limited Edition" of UFO: Enemy Unknown for the Amiga CD32 that included a Microprose travel alarm clock.
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X-Com: UFO Defense was named #22 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).
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A novelization of the game was published through the Proteus imprint of Prima Publishing. It written by Diane Duane and first published in December of 1995.
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In March of 2007, IGN said that X-Com is the number 1 PC game of all time. http://pc.ign.com/articles/772/772285p3.html
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The two brothers that started it all ( Julian and Nick Gollop) created Laser Squad Nemesis. It is based on the same gameplay mechanics, more or less. Free trial download is available from LSN homepage.
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X-COM: UFO Defense was ranked # 8 in the 50 Best Games of All Time list published by PC Gamer Magazine in its April 2005 issue.
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The game is heavy influenced from the TV series UFO . It's about a secret UFO defense base which sends out military aircrafts to shoot down UFOs, sending out squads to seek the wreckage and kill or catch aliens to analyze them.
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'X-Com: UFO Defense' was named the #3 game of the Top 50 Games of all time, by the editors of PC Gamer magazine in their October 2001 issue.
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GeForce owners have probably encountered display problems that render the game unplayable. This can be fixed though; go to the Windows Control Panel and the DirectX settings. Switch off DirectDraw hardware acceleration and the game should work fine.
Don't forget to switch acceleration back on afterwards, though.
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The CD version may include a partial install version and a full install version, depending on which CD you got. The partial install version leaves some datafiles on the CD to save disk space. However, the "full install" version is also on the CD in the HARDDISK directory.
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You can actually play "multiplayer" XCOM long before e-mail XCOM... By using sort of a "hack". As the game actually plays through turn by turn on both sides, it is actually possible to take the saved file right at the end of a turn, edit a pointer, and play the "other side" using the engine. And if you exchange files back and forth, you can have a multiplayer game.
http://www.tacticalplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?xcom/multip.zip
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The game is actually Geoscape, the rotating globe and resource management, generating the battlefield conditions for BattleScape, where you conduct tactical combat against the aliens. If you press Ctrl-C (as suggested by the hint "level skip") while in Battlescape, you interrupt the Battlescape program, preventing it from writing the "results" file. Thus you will get the same result as your previous battle. This is a result of the developement history (see the other trivia entries), whereas MicroProse decided that the tactical combat is not enough to be a game in itself, and asked Mythos to write a strategy game around it.
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In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, it was named by the readers the tenth best game of all time. The staff named it the third best.
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X-Com was voted #15 overall in PCGamer Magazine's Readers All-Time Top 50 Games Poll (April 2000 issue).
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The last offical patch changed the sound effects of the game. Many people didn't like the new sounds.
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X-COM: UFO Defense is one of the few 256-color DOS games to implement dynamic lightning. By using 16 shades of 16 different hues (16 x 16 = 256) as the palette, artists could create isometric tiles whose colors can be gradually changed simply by incrementing each tile's palette entries by 1, 2 and so on. In this way, the same tiles can be shown darker and darker simultaneously on the screen.
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A new version of the X-COM series dubbed "X-COM: Genesis", focusing on some of the gameplay features found in the original, was in production at Hasbro/Microprose in 1999. The project was cut during mass-layoffs for the company.
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A complete version of X-COM is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.
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