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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Why UFO: Enemy Unknown is the best game ever

11:59 / 13.09.05

UFO rocks. Still. I know it's primitive, the animation's dodgy and the manga intro is all-your-base-are-belong-to-us cheese, it's the son of Amiga's Laser Squad, which itself owes quite a lot to the Space Hulk board game, but it frickin' hits the spot.

WHO'S WITH ME?!

12:38 / 13.09.05

Yeah, it's marvellous. An amazing melding of micro and macro strategy.

That expansive but tightly defined freedom to choose what do you want to do right from the very start. The perfect development of the equipment that's available to you - you choose what you want to salvage and research (though I seem to remember the best weapons are available fairly early on, completely negating all the weaker types). The training up of your soldiers, each developing their own strengths - the marksman, the tough one, the one that can run and shoot fast. Each becomes dear: you can't let them die. The heart-stopping missions (the aims of which are often self imposed) - each step into unknown territory could be fatal, or lead to injuries that send the victim out of service for a month. That strategy of pushing forward slowly, coordinated, the full team covering each other's blind spots. The wait through the enemy's turn, small aural and visual clues as to where they are. The low, throbbing music turning up the pressure. The variety of environments - jungle, desert, town, farmland. Buildings from barns to houses to shops. Day and night missions - timing your squad's drop to get the best conditions. It was wonderful.

Is UFO: Enemy Unknown the best game ever? It's very, very good, but I felt the missions got a little samey in the end, with diminishing returns for the time you put into them once you've researched the bulk of what's there but have to clean up an alien crash to appease your fundgivers.

I would love to see a modern take on it. I never played Apocalypse - I heard that it was disappointing. I don't want any mucking about with gimmicks, mind. Just careful, thoughtful new ideas. Update the graphics, naturally. But they have to be kept clean. Keep it turn-based and all that. Maybe design a complete game environment rather than have UFO's random ones. Develop more specific mission aims, but retain the player's ability to choose. What else?

By the way, there's a GBA game called Rebelstar Tactical Command coming out on GBA soon, made by the UFO/Laser Squad team. Am looking forward to that...

12:50 / 13.09.05

I am. I think I had this on 3 formats. Amiga, Amiga CD and finally a big boxed set of all the UFO games on PC. I loved it, even on the Amiga, where each turn was preceded by 15 minutes of loading and the intro was a series of stills. A finely balanced piece of genius, from the early levels where your squad members died in droves as you sent rookies with rifles against hordes of alien types with plasma guns, right through to the end where your guys where hugely experienced with kit that would turn Heinlein's Starship Troopers green with envy. It had everything: basebuilding, strategy, tactics, research.
Terror from the Deep was the basically the same, but harder and bigger. I still loved it.
I never really got into Apocalypse, though I gather that was more my fault than the game's.
There was the strange Interceptor game, whhich had the base building & defense of the original, but instead of squad based t-b-t action had a wing commander-style flight sim.

16:38 / 13.09.05

I had to delete it. It was the only way to finish may degree.

18:56 / 13.09.05

The best game ever, and one of the very few I think that have managed to induce honest fear and dread while playing them. The counter-terror missions when you got caught attempting them at night are simply without equal. As noted, the missions do perhaps get a little repetitive near the end while you do the last bit of R&D necessary for the climax, but that's a small criticism for a game that already had so much despite the limitations of the era. That someone hasn't revisited it is baffling, but at least it allows us to hope that if it ever does happen, it will be done well and truthfully to the original, rather than ending up as Rainbow Six with aliens.

19:44 / 13.09.05

I loved UFO to small pieces, played it on my Amiga and then Terror from the Deep and Apocalypse on my PC at uni. *sigh* they just weren't as good as the original, TFTD was just too long and hard (oh dear god the ship missions) and Apocalypse I never finished I just lost interest.

But UFO, now that was the real thing, I still remember the first time my rookies crept down the loading ramp and started shooting at shadows

. Christ those first missions were horrific, if you weren't very sharp or lucky you got shot to pieces. And the first time those terror mission beasties came out of no-where were definate brown trouser moments

. And don't talk to me about etherals and their way of psionically controlling your men to shoot each other.

Btw has anyone heard of UFO: Aftershock, it's the sequal to UFO: Aftermath which tried to do what the orginal UFO did but by all accounts didn't quite make it. Which makes me hope they've solved the problems in the new game.

20:08 / 13.09.05

I thought Apocalypse was terrific, incidentally, and I speak as somebody who loved Rebelstar Raiders, Rebelstar II and all the previous X-Coms, even the undersea one that was a million times too hard. I thought the option to switch it to pausable RTS was great; sometimes, you know you've given people good enough orders, and you just want to watch them run around the map killing aliens, just making the odd tweak here and there.

My pants have been pre-wetted in anticipation of the European release of Rebelstar Tactical Command.

21:21 / 13.09.05

Does anyone know when Rebelstar Tactical Command is meant to be coming out?

Oh god, yes, the psionic controlling aliens - they were scum. Utter scum.

I remember getting the demo of TFTD off the cover of some PC magazine and playing its single tactical level over and over again. I never managed to complete it - all my soldiers would die every time. Didn't stop me from going back time and time again.

By the way, you can download UFO from here. A fix to get it running OK on a modern PC is here. If Underdogs is hosting it I guess the legality is pretty much okay. I think...

22:59 / 13.09.05

Didn't the rights go to Hasbro, or somebody equally pointless in terms of computer games? There was a cheap and nasty complete X-Com collection doing the rounds a few years ago.

Can't say I really ever enjoyed Enemy Unknown all that much, but that's possibly because I've only ever played the Plasystation port and I suppose they might have fucked it up a bit. It just seemed deeply unbalanced. If I performed well during the first month I'd be faced with a full-on alien invasion right at the beginning of the second, leading to my entire team being wiped out or my funding being reduced to zilch at the end of that one and game over. If I purposefully performed badly (or even just "less well") during the first month, my funding would immediately be reduced to such a low level that I had no chance in subsequent missions because I couldn't afford the necessary kit.

Like I say, though, could just be the PS version. It also featured the worst loading times I've ever come across on a console (we're talking over five minutes here) and required an entire memory card for a save position, so I was a bit down on it from day one.

Any of these problems sound familiar to players of the home computer versions? I mean, it could always be that I was just shit at it, but I generally do fine with turn-based strategy stuff.

Interceptor, on the other hand, I got a great deal of enjoyment from. The traditional base building side of things was much the same as it had aways been, as was the research, but the X-Wing/Wing Commander arcade flight bits that replaced the TBS were pretty special. Not really in terms of how they played - control, objectives and the rest of it were ripped directly from the aforementioned series - but in how they looked. It was all 1950s alien invasion stuff - flying saucers, lurid beam weapons - which was carried through all of the game's presentation.

Unfortunately, and in direct contrast to PS Enemy Unknown, it was a walk in the park. No challenge in the battles, which left the management and research to provide the meat. And when you took them on their own merits, they just couldn't hack it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:14 / 14.09.05

I enjoyed Aftermath... but come to think of it I haven't played it in aeons.

The original on the Amiga led to me smoking an awful lot of dope. It was really slow (on my machine, anyway) but I found this could be sidestepped by being really, really caned when I played it. Once I'd cracked that, it was addiction city.

08:05 / 14.09.05

I beleive the last game to be released under the UFO banner was in fact a beat-em-up. And it wasn't very good.
How's that for wasting what is widely remembered as the greatest game ever. Sorry, that should be evah!!!!11!!
The only thing worse than the psionic attacks was the incredibly quick alien that used to infect your men, turning them into one of those aliens. You could lose an entire squad to one of those fuckers.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:33 / 14.09.05

There was a tossy FPS (picked it up for three quid, and had a couple of hours of brainless fun- about three quid's worth, really)... it predated Aftermath- as far as I know Aftermath was the last, though you could easily be right.

10:35 / 14.09.05

Has anyone been reading the "Z-Com" fillers at Sluggy Freelance?

12:29 / 14.09.05

Ah, but Aftermath wasn't actually part of the X-Com franchise, even if it was obviously inspired by it. I've not seen the FPS though, so maybe I'm wrong.
I can't believe I just posted this. It is a measure of my love for UFO that I have been reduced to such geeky nit-picking. *hangs head in shame*

15:22 / 14.09.05

Does anyone know when Rebelstar Tactical Command is meant to be coming out?

No European release date announced yet. It's out in the States I believe.

Any of these problems sound familiar to players of the home computer versions?

No, not really, though as I said Terror From The Deep was impossibly hard at any difficulty level past the lowest (and not because of AI intelligence or anything, because you were just outgunned and outstatted and your people died far too often for you to keep up). Sounds like they ballsed up the port.