It's immortal.
I will explain shortly what this game is about, for the ones from you that haven’t played the game or ever heard about it. The year is 1999 (the game was released in 1993). The UFO phenomenon has become a global threat: there’s a constant and unstoppable wave of abductions, mutilated cattle, and sightings all over the world. The most powerful countries of the world, concerned about what seemed a covert invasion, united forces and created a special operations team called X-COM in order to investigate and contain the aliens. Your task is to manage and command the X-COM team.
The game, as it was typical of Microprose products, is twofold. The first half of it is the usual administration sim in which, from the CEO point of view, you must hire scientists, engineers and soldiers; build and dismantle facilities, sell and buy stock, manufacture goods, start investigations and so on.
The other half is the main strategy game, where you face yourself with the alien threat in a lot of different missions: gather materials from a UFO that was previously taken down by your interceptor planes, destroy alien bases, and (the most difficult but the best mission of them all) contain and repel a plundering alien raid on a city protecting and saving every civilian life on the map.
The map where you perform the mission is always randomly generated, taking as its seed the land type of the site and the time. If you are tracking a UFO that crashed on the Sahara desert in the middle of the afternoon, for example, the map will coincide with these data: it will be bright, with distinctive panoramic vision, and the sand will be yellow. Do the same thing at evening, and you will get a dark map with reddish sand. The worst thing that could happen to you is to be forced to play a mission in the middle of the night: you will get a map with lousy vision, but that doesn’t matter to the aliens since they do see very well in the dark (do you know what I mean?).
The alien threat comes in a wide assortment of flavors. Every creature has unique features and ways of attack. For example, the Ethereals don’t like to engage into hand-to-hand combat, so they will hide and try to control the mind of your soldiers via telekinesis. Floaters like to attack you from above, since they can float on air (as their name suggests). It’s a common feature to all the alien species in the game to hide and to ambush human soldiers, and they excel on both strategies. The most annoying creature is the Chrysalis, the most hated and cursed bug of the whole history. I don’t want to spoil it for those of you that haven’t played this game already, but the veteran players know of what I’m talking about. Believe me, you will end up wetting your pants anytime you see one Chrysalis strolling on the mission map.
The missions are played on a turn-based system that borrows a lot of concepts from the board wargames like Warhammer: time units, shot trajectory and initiative will be the basics of combat in X-COM; but don’t be afraid of this since the developers managed to make it accessible to every player. What you must be afraid of is the overall difficulty of the game. The AI of this game is unbelievably challenging, even for present standards. Even if you play this game at the easiest difficulty level, you may frequently find your entire soldier team wiped out by one single Sectoid (not to mention the Chrysalis). The computer actually plays as if it were you: it will deploy UFOs and build bases on Earth and learn about its foe just like you, but you will only be aware of a tiny portion of its movements. As you will realize soon, since you begin this game you are outnumbered and in complete disadvantage. The computer already knows that.
Making mistakes or losing are not affordable options. The countries that created and support X-COM want permanent success. In game terms, you get score for every mission you engage. The score is the final result of a sum of positive and negative points that you get for every thing you have done or not: every alien artifact recovered, every kill, every casualty on your forces or in the civilians, everything counts. Every month, the founding countries gather to make a balance of your performance. Do it well, and they will raise funds. Do it bad, and they will lessen funds. Do it really bad, and they will sign a non-aggression pact with the aliens and retire from the X-COM board. And you really don’t want this to happen, since the pact consists in that the aliens can establish themselves there and do whatever they want as long as they don’t harm the population of their host. As you can imagine right now, Terror missions are crucial in order to determine your performance (ignoring them is to commit suicide). It’s not strange that every month you get one or two of them to accomplish.
X-COM has a perfect and realistic atmosphere. It has an ambient soundtrack on General MIDI that nonetheless achieves its objective of giving you the creeps with accurate efficiency. If that isn’t creepy enough, add the permanent feeling of being always hunted by an invisible enemy that is more clever and powerful than you... Besides, while in combat, your soldiers behave and react like actual human beings. If one of your soldiers is looking on front, he won’t notice if an alien reaches him at his back until it gets there and kills him in cold blood. If a soldier is suddenly killed by an invisible foe (because the critter is outside the range of vision of your team and into the fog of war), the soldier next to him may get a panic attack, go postal, and start to shoot everywhere without noticing if he’s killing a friend, a civilian, a semaphore or a foe. Your soldiers could even get scared or demoralized enough to drop their weapons and run away.
Likewise, the sound effects of footsteps and doors that you may hear during the computer movement turn may give you clues about where the aliens are hiding, and sometimes this is the only possible way of finding them.
(One of the things that people haven’t unjustly noticed is a big difference on the Pedia feature between X-COM and the other Microprose products. In Civilization, for example, you can enter the Civilizopedia in your first turn and learn about every unit, building and technology of the whole game. Not true in X-COM. The Ufopedia will let you know about the units, building and technologies of the game, but only of those you’ve already unveiled through investigation. You’ll ignore the rest. This hugely helps to create and sustain the feeling of not knowing what will come after you next.)
You may think, after what I’ve told you so far, that this is a very deep and complex game. Very true. You will possibly think that these complexities, this excellent and challenging AI, this hardness to master the game, are the usual features in present games. True, but we’re talking about a game that was released in 1993. I can assure you, since I was fourteen by that time and experienced the “X-COM fever” in my flesh, that this game was absolutely revolutionary then; nobody could believe that a tiny 10 MB program could be so... perfect. It was the unbeatable gaming paradise for a very long time, and I may bet a million dollars that X-COM is still as revolutionary as it was in 1993 without fear of losing.
I lent X-COM to a ten-year-old nephew. At first, he complained about the pathetic graphics it has. A few minutes later, he complained about the turn-based combat system. Ten minutes later, he didn’t want to have dinner because he wanted to beat that bastard Reaper that was giving him a bad time on a Terror mission. Two days later, his father called me to ask me what have I done to his child, because he couldn’t unplug the kid from the “Martians killer”. I already knew that that was about to happen.
This demonstrates that X-COM is still alive, that it still has the power to hook people onto it with the same intensity it had twelve years ago. Even with the huge hardware and programming advances since then, X-COM didn’t grow old; and it keeps standing the pass of time with a proud smile. Do you know any other game that can say the same thing?