X-COM vs. XCOM: You Are All Wrong

Listen up, motherfuckers: I have prepared a brief* history lesson for all of you.

X-COM: UFO Defense is the best turn-based strategy game ever made. Period. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read about X-COM on Ufopaedia or, better yet, buy the game on Steam and play it (I highly recommend using XCOMUtil, a fantastically useful add-on I intend to natter about later). It is a product of its time, but the atmosphere and gameplay transcend its 320×240 resolution and almost disquietingly anime-esque art style.

UFO Defense was developed by Mythos Games in the early 90s, under the direction of Nick and Julian Gollop (at least 50% of whom are, I’m told, a pretty big deal in the tactical strategy scene); originally intended as a sequel to the highly successful 1988 strategy game Laser Squad, Mythos made the fatal mistake of courting high-profile publisher Microprose, and was subsequently forced to make a game that could be played and enjoyed by people who didn’t live in basements and spend fifteen hours a day reading SAS paratrooper manuals (I kid, I kid). The result, released in 1994 all over the faces of an unsuspecting public, was X-motherfucking-COM, and the rest is part of the easily summarized history that you can skim at one of the earlier Wiki links. I’m… not really sure why I bothered retyping it.

But I digress. One should note that European copies of the game bore the alternate title UFO: Enemy Unknown. This is interesting, because one of Gollop’s biggest inspirations for the game was an early 70s TV series by Gerry Anderson (yes, the marionette guy) called – fancy that – UFO. For those of you who haven’t bought the box set, you can read a nice summary of the show and its history courtesy of Professor Wikipedia. You’re the best, Professor Wikipedia!

The two properties are remarkably similar in premise: Alien spacecraft are visiting Earth for unknown but evidently sinister reasons, and a clandestine multinational organization is formed to investigate and repel their incursions. The differences arise from the fact that UFO was a character-driven sci-fi drama, while UFO Defense was a squad-level strategy game, but the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit might be considered a spiritual successor to UFO‘s Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (though with less ridiculous hair– actually, disregard that).

The game’s setting, on the other hand, drew from the infinitely crazier well of UFOlogy: the study and collected history of UFO sightings, encounters, and evidence (for certain values of ‘evidence’). Anyone who’s seen The X-Files – or, alternately, any of my fellow children of the late 80s who grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries – should be intimately familiar with contemporary UFO lore. Greys; Men in Black; Majestic 12; Area 51; Project Blue Book; et cetera, though with a particular eye towards the writings of Timothy Good – especially regarding alien psionics and the existence of various conspiracies and cover-ups (UFOlogy article drinking game: every time you see [citation needed], take a shot. every time you see a citation directly from a UFOlogist publication, down the bottle and wrap your car around a tree). The backstory of UFO Defense is cut pretty much whole cloth from early 90s UFO culture, and as such makes heavy use of government conspiracies and alien abductions for its numerous research blurbs.

There are people who claim that there were several other games in the X-COM series, some of which were good, and some of which were basically worse than Hitler. These people are allowed their delusions, but for the purposes of discussing the series as a whole I maintain that UFO Defense is the only game that matters. And in my opinion, X-COM’s overarcing theme; its core; its very HEART can be summed up by the following three points:

1.) Contemporary Setting

It’s all well and good to fight aliens, but nothing really drives home the ‘aliens’ part of that quite like fighting them today in your own goddamn backyard. UFO Defense started you off with modern equipment of human manufacture – rifles, rocket launchers, jet aircraft, etc. – and the option to work on researching laser weapons. For a good while, you’re combating advanced alien technology with armor-piercing bullets and kevlar armor, and then with weapons representing the theoretical apex of available human technology.

You field these weapons in besieged cities filled with panicking civilians, small towns with rows of two-floor houses, and tiny farmlands conspicuously devoid of livestock. In day-to-day life, the last thing you expect to step out of your petunia bushes is a goddamn spaceman with a plasma cannon, but in X-COM there are creatures from another planet hiding everywhere you aren’t looking, ready to melt the flesh off your skeleton the second you step around a blind corner.

In short, it’s not that aliens are invading Earth, it’s that they’re invading an otherwise completely unremarkable Earth. We have no advance warning, no contingency plans, and no elite squads of power-armored supersoldiers trained from birth to kill the living shit out of aliens. All we have are guns, moxie, and a willingness to take shit apart and kludge together new shit, which brings me to…

Two: Knowing Your Enemy

Yes, X-COM is a tactical strategy game.

Yes, the primary mode of gameplay is called the ‘Battlescape’ and involves shooting aliens until they die from it.

No, the key to defeating the aliens is not military action; the key is knowing your enemy. Getting inside their oversized heads and understanding their motivations. Taking apart their toys to find out how they work. Tying them to chairs and hitting them with baseball bats until they tell you where the hell they’re coming from and who they’re taking orders from. Even if you spend months shooting down flying saucers, not only do they keep on coming, but you’re barely seeing half of what’s going on; they’ll gladly plunk down installations, meet high-ranking politicians for lunch dates, and plan counterattacks against your bases while you’re busy chasing their scout ships on the other side of the planet.

In summary, the only way Earth can gain an edge against advanced alien technology is to steal it and fight fire with fire. To stop the invasion for good, you have to find out where they’re coming from, go there, and leave it a smoking hole in the ground; a task made difficult by the fact that they’re coming from outer-goddamn-space and the Shuttle probably isn’t going to survive combat duty. Figuring out how to accomplish this and kludging together a solution from secondhand UFO parts is 90% of the game; the shooting just makes it easier to gather up all their crazy magic space toys.

III. Never Having the Upper Hand

As stated before, you start the game with standard Earth weaponry, intercept UFOs with jet fighters, and schlub around in Not-Ospreys that don’t crash in a stiff breeze. Meanwhile, the aliens tote around flesh-melting plasma cannons like it ain’t no thang, and cruise back and forth across the interminable gulfs of space more readily than you can catch a bus in the morning. You will lose up to half of your squad every mission until you research better armor, after which it’s all smooth sailing.

Until you meet the aliens that fly. They’re fun! They particularly enjoy sniping from rooftops and scouting your troop positions from the top level of the map. But you’ll learn to deal with them soon enough, and as long as you remember to stay in cover (and blow up all the rooftops on the map before spreading out) they’re less of a problem.

… and then you get your first Terror Site! There’s a 50/50 chance it will be filled with hovering robots that are immune to bullets and shoot lasers capable of turning your soldiers to ash with a glancing blow. Also, they do something magical when killed. But they melt like butter when exposed to plasma weapons, so once you research all those guns you’ve been looting you might be able to complete a mission containing these things. Combine plasma weapons with better armor, and things will finally start looking up!

… aaaaaaand then you meet the grinning six-foot-tall bugs that can rip apart tanks with their bare claws, run at a speed that would make Usain Bolt weep openly, and have a habit of forcibly implanting embryos in your soldiers that will turn them into walking meat piñatas that explode into new bugs at the slightest touch. The only way to stop your ex-soldiers from turning into reinforcements is to kill them with fire. And if you’ve been selecting units for high reactions skill, it’s entirely possible to lose your whole squad to a cascading wave of zombification and reaction fire-induced parasitic replication.

You see what I’m getting at here, of course; every time you get a new toy or develop some new tactic that gives you an edge, the aliens pull the rug out from under you and stomp on your face ’til they hit pavement. And it hurts so good.

Recently (but still long enough ago for this writeup to almost completely cease being topical) it was announced that 2K Marin, the studio responsible for Bioshock 2, is working on a next-gen reimagining of X-COM. According to the blurb, it’ll be a tactical FPS in the vein of SWAT or Rainbow Six rather than an isometric turn-based strategy game. I’ll give you a few minutes to wail atonally.

…

Okay! Allow me to enumerate the reasons why turning X-COM into an FPS is a terrible idea:

1. Uh…
2. Hmm.
3. Well…
4. … Enforcer!
5. Motherfucking ENFORCER!

Actually, X-COM: Enforcer was a third-person shooter (Alliance would have been the FPS), but I’ll agree with myself for the sake of argument! Enforcer also came at the tail end of the original franchise, back when it was still caught in the black and wizened talons of Hasbro. You’ll recall that the previous installment, X-COM: Interceptor, was a space combat simulator in the vein of Wing Commander, taking place in the time between Terror From the Deep (in which the Earth’s surface is invaded by Lovecraftian monsters from a hojillion-year-old underwater colony ship) and Apocalypse (in which Megacity One is invaded by color-coded clay men who hop between dimensions in spaceships made of meat).

Okay, look… I may not be the best at the actual games. I’ve never, for example, beaten the final missions of the entire original trilogy using only starting equipment. But when it comes to ‘sperging over inconsequential background details, there is no ‘sperge ‘spergier than the ‘sperge ‘sperged by this ‘spergelord, so believe me when I say that the biggest problem with the X-COM franchise was continuity. Taking the story into the future is the worst possible thing to do with a game whose entire conceit is defeating aliens at a disadvantage using only sheer moxie; you lose immeasurable contrast and scale when you start with fancy space guns vs. more fancy space guns. Sci-fi is great and all (Syndicate and Crusader do the space guns vs. space guns thing rather well), but it’s such a gigantic leap from the entire point of the first game that it seems pointless. Why continue the story if you’re not going to play up what made it great in the first place? Why even keep the ‘X-COM’ name if it’s going to have nothing in common with the atmosphere of the original?

You see what I did there, of course.

Please take a moment to peruse this here forum thread I found regarding some of the viral marketing for XCOM. The astute of you may notice that the years spanned by Project Hermes roughly correspond to the years that Project Blue Book was active – the purpose of Blue Book being, as you remember, to determine whether or not UFOs posed a threat to national security (the predominant theory being that they were Soviet spy craft). The less astute of you may still have noticed that the case files deal with disappearances; mysterious ones, under mysterious circumstances. Alien abductions play a significant part in UFO lore, hinting that humanity is being studied by some unknowable alien intelligence, and I can think of no other explanation for so many missing persons coinciding with so many unusual phenomena. The secretive nature of Project Hermes and the Internal Defense Directorate should also strike a chord with anyone who’s read at least one rambling conspiracy theory, in which the government is always claimed to be responsible for some sort of massive (and extremely implausible) cover-up.

Finally, take another gander at that screenshot. That is a man and a car being vaporized not by an alien death ray, but by simply being NEAR the discharge of an alien death ray. Considering the dozens of rookies I lost to stray plasma fire, I think I would hazard a guess at this point that 2K ‘gets it.’

But… what’s that you say? You still want a 100% faithful next-gen remake of UFO Defense with the exact same gameplay?

Why?

To make it more accessible? Hey, remember at the beginning of the writeup, when I linked to the page on Steam where you can bypass eBay and labyrinthine abandonware sites and just buy X-COM for five bucks? You can get the entire series for less than twenty smackers, at that. You don’t even have to deal with the various amusing bugs that riddled the original 1994 release, since the Steam version is fully patched and XCOMUtil does a fantastic job of fixing what the patch missed – not to mention the fact that it adds innumerable new features, like storing soldier loadouts and sorting units in the transport by reaction skill. Playing the game without XCOMUtil at this point would be like trying to play it with your feet, while solving a Rubik’s cube behind your back: painful and ultimately fruitless, unless you’re putting it on YouTube for the sick amusement of others.

At this point, remaking X-COM is literally pointless. If you want to play a game with the depth and strategy of UFO Defense, then just… play UFO Defense. If what you want is a faithful remake with improved graphics and new gameplay elements, then tell one of the hojillion ‘spiritual successors’ to stop sucking so goddamn much. If you want a new game from the mind that brought you X-COM in the first place, then find where the hell Julian Gollop’s disappeared to and buy the man lunch. He’s earned it.

Really, the last thing the official IP needs is a slavish return to form – or, worse, yet another lackluster continuation. A complete paradigm shift is probably the best thing to happen to the franchise since its inception, and it’s sheer luck that we’re getting one that adheres so closely to the themes of the original. Things could easily be worse.

So, in conclusion…

* this was a lie, but you probably figured that out on the way down here