Look at my shiny new time sink!
Jun. 10th, 2007 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuOnce upon a time, in the dim mists of pre-history, the game X-Com: UFO Defense was released to the computer gaming world. And lo, it was good. And Sinanju did spend many, many, many hours playing that game. You, the player, were charged with defending Earth from the alien onslaught. Only your financial acumen and tactical abilities stood between mankind and total annihilation.
It was a terrific balance of global resource management and tactical combat. On the global scale, you had to build bases, staff them with soldiers and scientists, buy or research and then build ever better weapons, armor, and vehicles, capture and research alien tech and interrogate alien prisoners, working toward an eventual mission to Mars, where you crushed the alien threat once and for all. All with a completely inadequate budget, supplemented by selling off alien corpses and equipment.*
On the tactical scale, you had to recruit soldiers, equip them, intercept and shoot down alien spacecraft or respond to "terror missions" by attacking the aliens who were threatening civilians somewhere on the globe. There were a variety of environments in which to battle aliens, from farmland to jungles to city streets to arctic tundra, and a variety of alien species and weapons. The aliens also attempted to build bases on earth which you had to prevent--or ferret out, invade and destroy if they slipped them past you (and the longer the base went undiscovered, the harder it was to clean out).
The threats got tougher as the game progressed, of course, and you could play at various levels of difficulty. Initial decisions could radically alter the outcome of the game. If you didn't capture alien commanders or navigators, you'd never learn what you needed to know to mount an attack on Mars--and the alien invaders would arrive faster and faster and in greater numbers until the earth was overwhelmed and destroyed. Insufficient base defenses meant you could have your bases destroyed, and again the world was lost. Not dealing with alien incursions adequately meant that member nations of consortium would drop out, making separate deals with the aliens--and your funding was cut, making your job that much harder. Too many defections and earth was destroyed. Again.
I played this game for years. It was an amazing amount of fun. Alas, time marches on and computers got faster and faster. Eventually my computer was too fast for this DOS based game. Various hacks were created by fans to allow them to keep playing, but it got harder and harder to get the game to run. There were sequels made, but none of them were nearly as entertaining. Eventually, with the introduction of Windows XP, DOS based games won't run at all--they don't support them any longer.
X-Com came out in 1994 or so. Over the intervening thirteen years, there have been various attempts to create spiritual successors. Which brings me to the subject of this post. There's been a project called UFO: Alien Invasion in the works for years. I discovered it years ago but hadn't looked at it for a long, long time until recently. I stumbled across a link to it the other day and was surprised to find that they were up to version 2.1.1 and that it seemed to working pretty well.
And best of all, it runs in Windows, Mac and Linux. I downloaded and installed the Linux version last night. I've been toying with it since then. It installed beautifully, without the slightest hitch, and runs flawlessly on my system. I'm still learning how to use the game interface--the documentation is minimal, with lots of "to be documented later" placeholders. I fought my first successful battle against the aliens tonight (albeit on the Easy setting), just to see how the game works.
There is still a lot to be done to the game to make it a truly finished product. But you can move the camera POV around, zoom in and out, get a first-person POV from any of your soldiers (features X-Com never had). On the other hand, the terrain is indestructible; in X-Com you could destroy just about anything with enough firepower. Aliens hiding behind a wall? Blow a hole in it. Need to aggress a building but they've got the doors covered? Make your own entrance with a demo pack. In UFO:AI this is not an option.
There are a lot of other things that players will want to see improved--or added. But for a free game, a labor of love by fans of the original X-Com, it's pretty damn good. And they're still working on it. If I knew anything about coding, I'd probably help. As it is, I'll just keep playing with for a while.
*Who was buying all those alien corpses? Nobody knew, but I like to think it was Disney. Who was buying all the alien weapons and technology you were selling off? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But the real cash was in Laser Cannons. Once you'd done enough research to build those, you built a dedicated base for churning them out by the trainload and selling them for a hefty profit. Within a couple of months of game time, your income from that base made your governmental funding irrelevant; you could make more money than you could possibly spend--quite literally.
It was a terrific balance of global resource management and tactical combat. On the global scale, you had to build bases, staff them with soldiers and scientists, buy or research and then build ever better weapons, armor, and vehicles, capture and research alien tech and interrogate alien prisoners, working toward an eventual mission to Mars, where you crushed the alien threat once and for all. All with a completely inadequate budget, supplemented by selling off alien corpses and equipment.*
On the tactical scale, you had to recruit soldiers, equip them, intercept and shoot down alien spacecraft or respond to "terror missions" by attacking the aliens who were threatening civilians somewhere on the globe. There were a variety of environments in which to battle aliens, from farmland to jungles to city streets to arctic tundra, and a variety of alien species and weapons. The aliens also attempted to build bases on earth which you had to prevent--or ferret out, invade and destroy if they slipped them past you (and the longer the base went undiscovered, the harder it was to clean out).
The threats got tougher as the game progressed, of course, and you could play at various levels of difficulty. Initial decisions could radically alter the outcome of the game. If you didn't capture alien commanders or navigators, you'd never learn what you needed to know to mount an attack on Mars--and the alien invaders would arrive faster and faster and in greater numbers until the earth was overwhelmed and destroyed. Insufficient base defenses meant you could have your bases destroyed, and again the world was lost. Not dealing with alien incursions adequately meant that member nations of consortium would drop out, making separate deals with the aliens--and your funding was cut, making your job that much harder. Too many defections and earth was destroyed. Again.
I played this game for years. It was an amazing amount of fun. Alas, time marches on and computers got faster and faster. Eventually my computer was too fast for this DOS based game. Various hacks were created by fans to allow them to keep playing, but it got harder and harder to get the game to run. There were sequels made, but none of them were nearly as entertaining. Eventually, with the introduction of Windows XP, DOS based games won't run at all--they don't support them any longer.
X-Com came out in 1994 or so. Over the intervening thirteen years, there have been various attempts to create spiritual successors. Which brings me to the subject of this post. There's been a project called UFO: Alien Invasion in the works for years. I discovered it years ago but hadn't looked at it for a long, long time until recently. I stumbled across a link to it the other day and was surprised to find that they were up to version 2.1.1 and that it seemed to working pretty well.
And best of all, it runs in Windows, Mac and Linux. I downloaded and installed the Linux version last night. I've been toying with it since then. It installed beautifully, without the slightest hitch, and runs flawlessly on my system. I'm still learning how to use the game interface--the documentation is minimal, with lots of "to be documented later" placeholders. I fought my first successful battle against the aliens tonight (albeit on the Easy setting), just to see how the game works.
There is still a lot to be done to the game to make it a truly finished product. But you can move the camera POV around, zoom in and out, get a first-person POV from any of your soldiers (features X-Com never had). On the other hand, the terrain is indestructible; in X-Com you could destroy just about anything with enough firepower. Aliens hiding behind a wall? Blow a hole in it. Need to aggress a building but they've got the doors covered? Make your own entrance with a demo pack. In UFO:AI this is not an option.
There are a lot of other things that players will want to see improved--or added. But for a free game, a labor of love by fans of the original X-Com, it's pretty damn good. And they're still working on it. If I knew anything about coding, I'd probably help. As it is, I'll just keep playing with for a while.
*Who was buying all those alien corpses? Nobody knew, but I like to think it was Disney. Who was buying all the alien weapons and technology you were selling off? Again, your guess is as good as mine. But the real cash was in Laser Cannons. Once you'd done enough research to build those, you built a dedicated base for churning them out by the trainload and selling them for a hefty profit. Within a couple of months of game time, your income from that base made your governmental funding irrelevant; you could make more money than you could possibly spend--quite literally.
