X-COM: UFO Defense

aka: Laser Squad 2, UFO: Der unbekannte Gegner, UFO: Enemy Unknown, X-COM: Enemy Unknown, X-COM: Michi Naru Shinryakusha, X-COM: Terran Defense Force
Moby ID: 521
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

In the year 1998, the amount of reports of UFO sightings has been drastically increased. Stories about abductions and alien attacks became more and more widespread. Finally, after various nations of the world have failed to intercept the UFOs, their representatives met in a conference of global importance in Geneva, Switzerland. It was eventually decided to organize a secret paramilitary group, dubbed Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM). Starting with one base, two fighters, one transport, and a few soldiers, X-COM must locate the aliens, learn about their origins and technology, find out where their base is, and destroy it.

X-COM: UFO Defense is a strategy game featuring separate but interlinked elements. On the strategic side, called GeoScape, you get a rotating view of the globe, where you see all visible UFOs (those that are within your detection range) as well as major cities and your base(s). You order movements from here, such as sending out fighters to intercept UFOs, transports with soldiers to assault/recover UFOs, and perhaps assaults on alien bases (if you find any). You also control your research, as you must invent better weapons (the Terran weapons are just no match against the alien weapons) quickly, not to mention all the other cool tech you can recover from the aliens. You also need to control your budget, as you can't afford to overextend your reach. Researchers need to be paid, engineers (who build the new toys) need to be paid, base(s) need to be be built/expanded, planes need to be bought/maintained, supplies need to be replenished, and so on.

You can earn money by selling unneeded stuff, and you receive funding from the nations of the world; however, a nation can decrease its funding if it decides you aren't operating efficiently enough within its region. It's even possible that a nation gets so fed up with you that it signs a pact with the aliens and ceases funding altogether.

Once you join a ground battle, the game switches to Battlescape, which is an isometric view of the battlefield with realistic line-of-sight calculations and turn-based combat. Your mission is usually extermination of all aliens on the battlefield, though if you can capture a few it would surely help your research efforts. If you win, you also recover any alien artifacts left on the field, which can then be researched.

In combat, each of your soldiers has a specific number of Time Units. Doing anything (moving, shooting, turning around, rearranging objects in the inventory etc.) costs a number of TUs. Once a soldier is out of TUs, he cannot act any more this turn (he gets all his TUs back on the next turn, though).

Spellings

  • X-COM 未知なる侵略者 - Japanese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

24 People (22 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 45 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 380 ratings with 26 reviews)

Definitely tops in my book for classic gaming.

The Good
Innovative concept, outstanding graphics for 1994, excellent turn-based combat engine. This game was the first I played that put me in control of an entire military operation, from management and logistics to strategy and tactics. It was up to me to keep my guys alive! And the steadily improving stats of your soldiers made you very attached to them, so you'd give them names and keep up with their progress! Needless to say, many an hour has been wasted, erm, I mean spent, defending the earth from extra-terrestrial terrorists.

The Bad
Jerky mouse interface in the equipment and battlescape screens. Will sometimes evilly corrupt my latest savegame and make me start from the last one.

The Bottom Line
A must-play for anyone who considers themselves a serious PC gamer.

DOS · by Michael Reznick (37) · 2001

One of the best games ever? Yes

The Good
The turn-based tactical playing, the RPG style of the characters, the financial strategy. The integration of all the "playing styles". I remember the sensation when your best squadron Captain dies in action after many successful missions... the first alien kill of the a rookie... One of these games that you remember by itself, not the circumstances around.

The Bad
The interface.

The Bottom Line
Strategy and turn-based tactical game with RPG-style characters.

DOS · by Dertalai (13) · 2006

syndicate with aliens

The Good
Well, the game is very large. It's more like 2 or 3 games. Soooo.....

<u>Fighting Battles</u>
The game engine for the battles is simply brilliant. I mean, the core engine used to make this game is still being used again and again and licensed out to other developers (like in Chaos Gate). I liked the realism, how a single alien could sometimes wipe out half of all of your XCOM-Operatives as soon as they stepped outside of the dropship. I also liked how one of your operatives could go into an alien ship by himself and slaughter them all (though this happens less often than the former). The weapons, the graphics, the aliens, the myriad of strategies employed to bring victory makes the battle system an absolute stroke of genius.

<u>Building Bases and Researching</u>
Another great thing about this game is the research system. In Syndicate you researched weapons and other technologies too, but it wasn't fun. In this game it is. You also have to hire engineers to manufacture the weapons, and then you also have to build labs and manufacturing plants for your scientists and engineers, and... Another neat feature in this game is how you build bases and maintain them. You have to micromanage everything, from shipments of clips of ammo for your soldiers' pistols to buying tanks and high tech interceptors. You also have to build bases. The facilities you build allow you to do new things, or get more of something. All employees such as soldiers and scientists require living quarters to live in. Scientists need laboratories to work in. You need general stores to keep all of your items. You need hangers to keep ships.... You can also build more than one base, and sometimes aliens attack your base and you get to fight in them. The location of your base also matters, because it affects your ability to defend funding countries, which brings me too...

<u>Those Ungrateful Bastards</u>
You are running an international defense agency, so you are sent funding by all of the nations on a monthly basis. They pay you a certain amount of money; some more, some less. However, if you do a bad job of defending them they will lower their funding and even withdraw it if you do a really bad job! So you have to build your bases close to your primary funders.

<u>Air combat</u>
This is one of the smaller portions of the game but still is important. Sometimes you send out interception missions to shoot down alien aircraft; there are strategies to this section too but what you actually do in these situations is very limited.

There. The game is absolutely huge and wonderfully built, a technological masterpiece.

The Bad
If you completely blow out the bottom story of a house, or a lower section of a street light, the upper parts would stay intact floating in the air. Alien intervention perhaps =)

The Bottom Line
One of the best games ever made.

note:
July 2000's PC Gamer issue distributes the full version of this game along with a bunch of other full version games such as the original Monkey Island and Descent. It's a great chance to pick up some games you missed out on in the original release.

DOS · by wossname (203) · 2000

[ View all 26 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
in between ranks MerlynKing Jan 25, 2019
The original X-COM was cancelled, but development continued in secret Freeman (64644) Apr 27, 2017
Uh, shouldn't the title be UFO: Enemy Unknown...? Simoneer (29) Oct 8, 2010

Trivia

1001 Video Games

UFO: Enemy Unknown appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Difficulty Level Bug

DOS version of the game has a bug in the difficulty settings. Regardless of which difficulty level you choose, you always start at the easiest level. Surprisingly, the official patch of the game does not correct this problem. However, there is an unofficial patch available for solving this issue. Problem is also solved in The Collectors Edition Windows port (also commonly known as UFO Gold or CE).

The game contains many different other bugs. All of them are gathered on UFOPaedia.

Cancelled successor

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.

CD-ROM version

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.

The CD version of the game for DOS was not different from the original floppy one. However it contained animated introduction (the very same which was later used in Amiga CD32 version and (from the Playstation version) and the executable file was patched and some bugs were eliminated.

Creation

Jullian Gollop, designer of X-COM: UFO Defence tells how X-COM was created (taken from the Mythos Games web site):

We showed a demo of ‘Laser Squad 2’ on the Atari ST to Microprose in 1991. The idea was to produce a sequel to ‘Laser Squad’ but with much neater graphics using an isometric style very similar to Populous. They liked what we had done so far, but they explained that they wanted a ‘big’ game. I said "what do you mean by ‘big’" and they said "well, you know – BIG". They also said that it had to be set on earth, like Civilisation or Railroad Tycoon, because people could relate to it much more. So we went away, scratched our heads and thought about it. Then we came up with the idea of adding on a grand strategic element to the game, very firmly set on earth, in which the player managed an organisation that defended the planet against UFO incursions. I bought quite a few books on UFOs for research purposes so that we could give the game an even more ‘authentic’ basis.

The project started reasonably well with myself and Nick designing and programming, while the art was to be done by John Reitze and martin Smillie at MicroProse. Soon we had some problems because Microprose did not understand our game design and they asked for clarification. Several documents later we were not much better off and I had wasted a lot of time. Certain creature types were removed, including the ‘Men In Black’ and others added. Then the whole project was nearly axed when MicroProse made some cutbacks due to financial difficulties. Everything proceeded reasonably smoothly for a while until Spectrum Holobyte acquired Bill Stealey’s shares in the company. Our producer was made redundant and the game was nearly axed again. Finally we had to spend a couple of months working very long hours at MicroProse in Chipping Sodbury to get the game finished by the end of March in 1994.

Element 115

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.

GeForce problems

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.

Geoscape

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.

Influence

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.

Multiplayer Workaround

You can actually play "multiplayer" X-COM long before e-mail X-COM... 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

Novel

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.

Patches

The last offical patch changed the sound effects of the game. Many people didn't like the new sounds.

V1.4 patch removed the document check copy protection.

Releases

A complete version of X-COM is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine. - There was a "Limited Edition" of UFO: Enemy Unknown for the Amiga CD32 that included a Microprose travel alarm clock.

Technology

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.

Awards

  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1995 – #2 Best Strategical in 1994 (Readers' Vote)
    • Issue 02/1996 – Readers' Special Award for 1995
  • Computer Gaming World
    • May 1995 (Issue #130) – Game of the Year
    • May 1995 (Issue #130) – Strategy Game of the Year
    • July 1996 (Issue #144) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary Issue) - #22 on the "150 Best Games of All Time" list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) –#1 Top Sleeper Of All Time
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #3 Best Game of All Time (Editors' Choice)
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #10 Best Game of All Time (Readers' Choice)
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • January 1996 (Issue 78) – Game of the Month (Playstation version)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #35 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #73 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • IGN
    • March 2007 - #1 PC Game of All Time
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #15 on the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • October 2001 - #3 on the "Top 50 of All Time" list
    • April 2005 - #8 on the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1995 – Best Genre Mix in 1994

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Andrew Grasmeder, Der.Archivar, Entorphane, Kasey Chang, Lord FlatHead, Heikki Sairanen, Martin Smith, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, robotriot, Rola, rstevenson, ZuljinRaynor

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Related Sites +

  • OpenXcom
    An open-source clone requiring resources from the original game.
  • UFOpeadia
    A whole wiki-based Database containing nearly everything one wanted to know about the game and beyond...
  • X-COM Tactical Command
    X-COM Tactical Command has an excellent range of content, now including information on hexediting UFO's files, as well as strategy guides and more.
  • XCOMUTIL Homepage
    The homepage for Scott T. Jones' fantastic XCOMUTIL utility: Re-vitalise and expand your X-COM game! :)
  • XCommand
    One of the most popular fan-sites for the X-COM series.
  • XCommand
    XCommand features various files for editing UFO, as well as strategic aids and the full contents of the UFOPedia.
  • devisraad.com - X-COM Page
    Download complete sets of new alien spacecraft, for X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror From The Deep.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 521
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Contribute

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by IJan.

Windows added by Shoddyan. Amiga added by Rebound Boy. Amiga CD32 added by Martin Smith. PlayStation added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: xroox, Kate Jones, Kasey Chang, Josh Day, //dbz:, Alaka, Игги Друге, 88 49, BostonGeorge, Patrick Bregger, mailmanppa, Rwolf, FatherJack, Evolyzer.

Game added December 4, 1999. Last modified January 23, 2024.