Tim Scott

X-COM: UFO Defense (DOS)

Best PC Game Ever

The Good
X-Com is one of those rare games that gets just about everything right. I've always thought this was one of the best games I ever played for the PC, but recently began wondering if nostalgia was simply making it out to be more than it was. I've been playing it recently for a week straight, and have quickly come to the conclusion that this IS my all-time favorite PC game. I will tell you why:

The game combines both a strategic and tactical game in one. Both are equally complex and important, and FUN in their own right. As a strategy gamer, running the operations of my X-Com bases is pure delight. One portion of the game is ran from the Geoscape. This is a real-time view of Earth from outer space. It shows locations of your X-com bases, major cities, detected UFO's, crashed/landed UFO's, alien bases and cities being terrorized. Some things, such as Alien bases, you need to find before they appear. Once a UFO is detected, you send out your interceptors to shoot it down. Once it's shot down, you then send out your Skyranger filled with X-Com operatives to secure the landing site. This is where the game turns into the tactical portion of the game.

At the start of the battle, all your X-Com operatives are inside the Skyranger which has just landed at the crash site. As you exit, you may or may not run into aliens in the vicinity. Eventually, you will, and this is where your soldiers take the fight to the aliens. Most of the game you will be behind the aliens in technology, so will need to use a lot of tactics and heavy firepower (grenades, rockets, etc) and some luck to fight the alien menace. As you win fights and secure alien crash sites, ALL their technology is captured and taken back to your X-Com base. From there, you can assign scientists to research ANYTHING. Alien corpses, live aliens, alien rifles, grenades, UFO power sources, UFO navigations, etc. Everything researched has value, whether it's tangible or just information. Do you research alien plasma rifles so your troops have better weapons, or UFO craft equipment so your fighters can shoot down bigger UFO's? You'll constantly be making these decisions throughout most of the game. The research and discovery aspect of this game, especially the first time playing it, makes X-Com one of those games where you catch yourself saying, "I'll go to bed once I researched...".

Then once a new weapon is researched, for example, you get to actually use it in the tactical combat. In X-Com you are always progressing, and seeing the benefit of this progression in actual gameplay is a real joy. Throwing your first alien grenade and seeing it do much more damage than your own grenades, or seeing a soldier survive multiple hits because of some new armor he donned due to the research you've done is great!

The tactical portion of the game is almost like an RPG. You hire new soldiers from your base screen, in the strategic portion of the game. Each soldier has about 8 statistics that can increase the more missions he/she goes on, and how many aliens they kill. They not only gain skills (Like accuracy and strength), but also rank. What happens to soldiers in a tactical fight is how their skills raise. So if you load a soldier up with a ton of equipment each mission, their strength increases, allowing them to do more with more weight. If they fire a lot, and kill aliens, their accuracy increases. The detail is amazing! Each soldier has a first and last name, so soldiers who survive a lot of missions you'll begin to get attached to. You'll see someone like Alan Davies, and remember some of the heroic missions he went on where he barely escaped death and killed the last three aliens with a well placed grenade. Then, unfortunately, some day he'll die and you won't be losing a generic soldier. You'll be losing a veteran who you grew accustomed to and counted on to be the leader on every excursion. Now you have to get a replacement who may panic the minute a friend dies next to him.

The tactical combat, even though the graphics are dated, are still very atmospheric and creepy even to this day!! Especially if you haven't played the game before, the first time one of your soldiers turns a corner or enters a new room and sees an alien for the first time your heart will jump. "What the hell is THAT thing??" you'll ask, and notice the soldier that just saw the alien doesn't have enough turn points left to fire at him. The detail in the tactical combat is amazing. Objects can block weapon fire, smoke and objects can block line of sight, smoke can knock aliens/humans unconcious, explosions can rip holes into the sides of buildings, etc. Each weapon/item has a lot of uses as well. Equip a motion detector, and you can see movement 'blips' around that soldier. Use a medikit on a soldier, and you can use three different things: Painkiller, Stimulate or Heal. Different body parts can be injured to, so you choose the body part and heal it. I can go on and on about the level of detail of this game, but these are just some examples!

The game is highly addictive, and is rightly seated in gamers' minds as one of (if not THE) best PC game of all time. Play it for yourself and find out. Even for being so old, the gameplay is still golden!

The Bad
While X-Com has gameplay second to none, anyone worth their salt can tell you it has its problems as well. Graphics are old, but they don't affect gameplay. There are plenty of crashes in X-Com, even the Collectors Edition, and especially so now on WinXP. You have to save quite often, but the game is SO good, this will become second nature, and getting back into a game takes a matter of seconds. the only time you'll get pissed about this is if you had forgotten to save in a long time, or after a very long and important battle that you had won. An auto-save feature would be nice!!

Equipping your soldiers before each battle is also a big hassle. It would have been terribly useful if you could assign equipment loads that were automatically saved, so your soldiers would be equipped properly before each battle. For example, some soldiers I designate as (Hvy), which I typically give the heavier loadouts too (Rocket launcher + rockets, medikit, extra grenades, etc). It'd have been very useful if they started with that loadout at the start of each mission. Instead, you have to manually load each soldier every time. A nagging issue that you never truly get used to.

Lots of general bugs, such as loading a saved game that was in tactical combat and had proximity mines down. They are now gone and useless once you loaded the game.

Some weapons/research aren't very useful, such as most HWP's as they die in a few shots and are very expensive, and pistols.

The difficulty can sometimes be very frustrating, especially to casual players. Aliens are generally very accurate, and in the early to mid game you will experience a lot of casualties, even if you win a fight. Especially terror missions! Another thing that is frustrating, especially on terror missions, is that you can sometimes barely get off your Skyranger before half or most of your squad is killed. You get half your guys off, four aliens are waiting right outside, and either blast them all before they can get a shot off or just throw a grenade there and annihilate your entire team. Would have probably been smart for the X-Com team to land a 'wee' bit away from the terror site and then work their way to it.

There's other problems, and annoyances with X-Com that I can't fully document here. They are experienced after heavily playing the game (which most people will!), but ultimately NONE of these problems will deter you from playing it. X-Com proves to the current industry you don't need high production values to make a classic game. Even with the dated graphics, sound, music(which is actually still kinda creepy!) and bugs this game is a shining achievement in gameplay!

The Bottom Line
X-Com is a strategic and tactical game where you defend earth from an alien invasion. You control everything about X-Com, from purchasing weapons and equipment, building new base facilities, intercepting UFO's, researching alien technology, manufacturing new equipment, investigating crash sites and ultimately finding a way to eliminate the alien invasion once and for all!

By Tim Scott on April 11, 2005

Command H.Q. (DOS)

True "Beer and Pretzels" gaming!

The Good
I played this game way back in the day and just recently started to play it again. This is a great, casual gamers 'wargame' that can still be played today 15 years after it was released. There are three distinct modes of play, "WW1, WW2 and WW3" that each offer unique/new units. Airplanes, carriers and tanks appear in WW2 but not WW1 for example, offering you new strategic opportunities.

For being so simple in design, however, there were enough 'rules' and variations to each unit to allow lots of different strategies. For example, tanks move faster than infantry but infantry can entrench. Tanks can 'blitz' through units, but infantry can be paradropped. Flanking gives combat bonuses, as well as the terrain you fight in (Forest, mountain, etc). Carriers and cruisers can bombard land units, subs are invisible when stationary and can kill transports in one shot, and airplanes can perform a variety of missions (Bomb enemy units, enemy cities, paradop infantry, CAP, dogfight, etc).

In WW3 a whole new element to gameplay is introduced in diplomacy, oil and nukes. Each side can try and sway a city to your side by spending money on them, launch spy satellites to reveal all enemy troop locations, fire nukes to blow away a grouped enemy units, and fight over oil so your war machine can actually move around the map. All of this is so simply done, anyone can pick it up and play!

All of these variations allows you to try all sorts of different strategies. As the Axis, do you want to spend extra money on your subs to hunt the Atlantic and keep US reinforcements away? Or do you spend your money on extra panzer divisions to smash through the Russian front? Or do you focus all your energy on the Japanese, take out the US threat and invade America? Each side has a multitude of possibilities for you to choose from, and with three different wars and varying computer difficulty, you'll spend a lot of time with this game.

The Bad
Obviously, the graphics are dated, but you get used to them. The sound is poor because of its age, but just play some appropriate music in the background while you play.

From playing the game SO much, there's a lot of things I'd love to see added. For one, I really wish there was an editor to make your own scenarios. For example, it'd be interesting to make a Red Dawn scenario, where America is invaded already and you have to control what is left of the US military + their partisans plus the remaining European forces, or to play as the Russians/Cubans in an attempt to crush the US once and for all.

I'd also like to see some new units/abilities. For one, units don't gain any kind of experience. My sub in the Atlantic that sank 5 transports should gain more health, or deal more damage. It'd be nice if there were as a Marine unit, which received bonuses for amphibious invasions and could move faster than normal infantry divisions. These are merely wish list items though, overall the game delivers what it intended and for that it is a great game.

The Bottom Line
A grand-strategy world war game, covering WW1, WW2 and WW3. A simple, "Beer and Pretzel" wargame that anyone can jump into and enjoy for hours as a desktop General.

By Tim Scott on April 11, 2005