For those of you old enough to remember, there was a game that came out of nowhere called XCOM UFO Defense. The game as developed by Julian Gollop and published by Microprose in 1994. It was also published for the Playstation.

 

 

In the game, you headed an international organization whose purpose was to combat extraterrestrial invaders, either by shooting them down with your fighter jets in real time, and by engaging aliens on the ground. Such engagements are played out in turn-based strategy. Fog of war was a big part of the game as well as interrupts. Sometimes these would play out in your favor, though more often in the aliens' favor (at least at the beginning). The aliens have your forces outgunned, outnumbered, and overmatched. Enemies can control your squad members via psychic attack. There are the little grey guys (sectoitds), but  that is only one of several units you'll face. There are the Floaters who float and snipe you from above, the extremely tough Mutons, and then the Chryssalids that could care less about your armor and implant eggs that turn humans into zombies.

 

 

It seems humanity is doomed, until you start retrieving some of their technology and and their weapons, reverse engineer them, and use them against them. You can learn these psychic abilities, control the aliens, and fight back. You manage your bases and research as well as relations with other countries. Aliens would attack your bases so you had to worry about defending them as well.

 

On the downside, the game could be hard. Demon's/Dark Souls hard?  Let me put it to you this way: an adept at the aforementioned games would probably be crying for momma.  You had a lot of stuff to manage.  For example, you could make multiple bases: one for your main operations, another to manufacture items for sale in other parts of the world.  Well and good, until the aliens decide to attack them.  Oh, and on top of that, you had to worry about not only terror attacks, countries would make deals with the aliens and cut off your funding, often when you needed it the most. Oh, and once a soldier gets killed in combat, he/she's gone. You can lose you most experienced soldiers that way.

 

However, it was also absorbing. It is regarded by many to be one of the best games ever made (right up there with the Civilization series). The game has not aged well...what video game that is almost twenty years old has for that matter? There is an FPS reboot being developed by the creators of Bioshock 2, but for those who yearn for the classic strategy game, Rejoice! A reboot of the original has been announced coming from Firaxis, and none other than the brilliant and venerable Sid Meier is the director of creative development.

 

"It comes down to this is a game we wanted to make.  This is a game we loved the original iteration  of, and we thought we could do a lot with this game."  Sid commented in a recent interview with Game Informer. Jake Solomon, the lead designer on the project states that the game is all about people being taken. "The player is responsible for responding to these incidents" speaks Jake.

 

 

He is a huge fan of the original game and plays it regularly.  Updating a game of XCOM's scale is not easy.  Just like in the original, the player must also deal with governments from around the globe.  The game is not going to be a clone of the original, however. Time units in favor of a move action system. The player can either move and fire or or move very far. Some fans of the original have expressed concern that these changes may dumb down the game. For example as of this writing, it seems that you can only have one base, albeit with hangars in other countries. 

 

Jake assuaged those fears in an interview by pointing out that no changes were made without extensive testing. In the case of time units versus the move action system, testing was done with both systems and testers overwhelmingly preferred the move action system. And anyone who know Firaxis knows that they have making great strategy titles down to a science.

 

 

Screens look incredible and the difficulty isn't going anywhere.  Flanking and cover fire are key to the fight. A new enemy will be introduced known as The Thin Man. He is based on the Men In Black and brings about the idea that there are enemies amongst us. He looks human enough that you would miss him in a crowd, but he is not quite a perfect copy. He inhumanity will be evident when you fight him. His style is based off of Aeon Flux characters. One move where is inhumanity is evident is when he seems to have too many joints as shown in the second illustration below. He also can unhinge his jaw and vomit poison from his mouth.

 

Though strategy titles of this type are most at home on a PC, console owners need not fear missing out.  The title will be released for the PS3 and the XBox 360 as well. Now if ony Civilization II would come out on the PSOne classics so I could play it on the go...