UFO: Enemy Unknown retrospective
And so there are these aliens and to stop them and you have loads of different guns but then they’ve got like Snakemen and psychics and you have to build a base and you shoot down UFOs with jets and there are missiles and lasers and radars and scientists making stuff then you get flying suits and hover tanks and you can mind control things and you build your own UFOs and there are zombies and you go to Mars and you fight a big eyeball and there’s this remote-control missile launcher and you carry dead aliens in your backpack and… It’s deeply strange to be in a position where I need to assess why the original X-COM: UFO defense, aka UFO: Enemy Unknown, was and is so brilliant. My earliest encounters with it were based on babbling schoolyard enthusiasm, the joyful disbelief of the 12-year-old over the quantity of sci-fi indulgences on offer in this strange, apparently unheralded game. At the time, it sounded like lies – the innocent stream-of-conscious blather of any young boy when talking about something that had fired their imagination. So discovering that all that mad stuff really was in the game was a blissful moment – and even had X-COM been a terrible game, I’m fairly sure it would have lodged permanently in my impressionable mind anyway.Come 2012, pre-teens cannot be moved so easily: they’ve done it all a thousand ways in a thousand games and a thousand episodes of Ben 10 and Doctor Who, and quite frankly so have grown-ups too. So all the discussion around this week’s remake has become acute dissection of why it does or doesn’t work, and of course how it compares to its revered parent.Read more…
