6: X-Com: UFO Enemy Unknown
Even to this day few titles have managed to match this seminal PC classic for pure tension building. Tasked with defending the world from impending doom, XCOM puts the player in a hot-seat that felt positively roasty-toasty. After building your base HQ and assigning the world’s finest scientists to the development of emergency weapons technology, you’d then sit back and wait for the first UFO to appear on the outskirts of your radar scan.
Moments earlier: Rookie Jim excitedly primed his first grenade.
Intercepting and shooting down these craft often proved to be little trouble as long as you refrained from biting off more than you could chew, but wiping out the aliens carried by the crash-landed craft often proved a nerve-wracking experience. Most of you will no doubt be familiar with the ’fog of war’ system used in strategy games, but the system employed by XCOM was far crueller: Gifted only with the knowledge of what your squad could directly see at that precise point, watching the alien forces take their turn was often simply a hectic montage of flashing movement and incoming shots, leaving you to try and judge where the enemies were located based on the snippets of hazy information you’d just been fed. Failing to cover all angles at any stage could often result in a large number of casualties: XCOM was by no means a fair game. As you slowly developed a more powerful force, the aliens seemed in turn to endlessly up the ante; firing rockets that could happily navigate around 8 corners and using telepathic powers to take control of your grenade-laden rookies, often to disastrous effect.
The most terrifying aspect of XCOM however was the ’terror missions’. Large craft have suddenly attacked a capital city, and you’re left with no choice other than to drop everything you’re doing and send your squad to the city immediately. Often you’d find yourself deploying squads that were in no condition for combat, the alternative though was far grimmer: failure to deal with the threat might result in the country being taken over by the aliens, or at the very least lose you a heavy chunk of your vital monthly funding. In these terror missions you were up against entirely different breeds of alien who had spread out through the area and begun seriously harassing/killing/eating the locals.
Sacre Bleu! Un aliene!
Usually it was safest to wait till sunrise to investigate a UFO crash, to avoid the severe loss of vision that accompanied night missions. The immediacy of terror missions however rarely allowed for such luxury: Underprepared and rushed your men would slowly move outside of the craft to be faced with an unknown force, the plasma shots striking down the unlucky first few out of the ship your only guide for where the enemy might be. Faced with the nastiest aliens in the roughest conditions, terror missions at night could easily result in your entire team being wiped out by unseen forces, a crippling blow which usually too spelled an end for the earth. Trying to make out moving black shapes juxtaposed on black backdrops as one by one your soldiers were either decimated or assimilated by the enemy; terror missions did exactly what they said on the tin.
Part 2 will be featured next week!
