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Note that this review would, perhaps, be best called a Game Review and Game Review Review, because I'm questioning the results I've seen from a lot of big-name review groups on this one. I'll explain more in the relevant section. Enjoy.

Veterans of my blog will know that I am not one to listen to hype. There's a few series that I will buy into eagerly, but for the most part, I'm pretty resistant to urges to try new games purely on a recommendation. As an example, Antipothis, a long-time friend an associate, has had to push me notoriously hard to try certain games, even if, at a glance, they seem to be slam-dunk run-away favorites.

The general synopsis is that I'm fucking hard to please and unnecessarily cautious. After things like this fucker and this, I don't react well to game series that I enjoy getting their legs cut out from under them. It pisses me off, and when I get pissed, I tend to rant about it. That said, this review isn't of a bad game, so you needn't get your pantaloons disorganized.

What I've found strange with this game, and indeed, what Antipothis has as well, is that the game has gotten absolutely blasted by critics - in a fashion that has me questioning whether or not any of the reviewers played the same game I've been. Ausgamers, for example, gave the game a 3.5 out of ten - lower, in fact, than the score they gave Duke Nukem Forever - whilst Eurogamers likewise trashed it, giving it a 4 out of 10 - pretty much the same score they gave Vampire Rain. IGN gave this game a 4 out of 10 - One and a half points lower than they scored DNF.

Let this sink in a second. Their outright implication from the overpowering majority of the mainstream critics on this is that this game is worse than Vampire Rain and Duke Nukem Forever.

Are you scared yet? I know I was.

Firstly, let me dispel accusations of fanboyism square away, and state that Operation: Raccoon City is not a game without notable flaws. What is bizarre, however, and frankly unnerving, is that the very flaws bashed in this game are ones that go completely ignored in other games of this very genre. Other criticisms are either wholly baseless (Ausgamers claims that the game has no narrative and zero plot - after Duke Nukem Forever no fucking less; Eurogamers claims that none of the upgrades for the character classes are worth it), and really.... Disturbingly out there.

Folks, I've played Vampire Rain, for fuck's sake. I've played Duke Nukem Forever. I've even played fucking Shadow the Hedgehog in a tandem play-through/MST3K-ing with Neil. I've beheld the horrors of Bubsy 3D and Raid 2012 first-hand. I know bad games. Yet the other reviewers openly state that Operation Raccoon City is nothing less than the worst game of the year based by scores alone. Maybe they need to watch the quintessential tutorial of what bad games really are, and how critical they are to unbiased video game reviewing.

I'm sorry that intro was wordy, but it needed to be said. My fellow reviewers are not doing a good job on this one. Destructoid and Gameshark are thus far the only reviews that are more-or-less accurate, with all of the others being notably worse.


The Graphics aren't top-tier, but the gameplay and environments certainly hold up.

So Operation Raccoon City, then.

It's an interesting, action-oriented title that harkens back to the days of RE2 and RE3, and which does so in a way that re-envisions things in a far more intriguing fashion than initially. Putting the player(s) in the boots of the USS (Umbrella Security Services), your squad is, functionally, the unit that gets called in when Umbrella needs something cleaned up. In this dark alteration of Resident Evil 2 and 3, William Birkin got wise to Umbrella knowing about the G-Virus, and contacted the US Government, offering them all the information he had about Umbrella and their ongoing projects in exchange for asylum for him and his family. As a member of the USS's Wolfpack squad, you are sent in to prevent him from ever making the exchange. The Virus escapes containment as was the case in RE2, and from there, shit gets real. It falls upon Wolfpack to eliminate all evidence of Umbrella's involvement with the Raccoon City Incident, or they won't get extraction. With monsters infesting the streets and the US Military actively gunning for them, the USS has a tough array of missions ahead.

And it is on that note that the game starts up proper. You get six classes of soldier - Demolitions, Recon, Assault, Medic, Surveillance, and Field Scientist. These soldiers each have their own unique abilities and skills, and it is up to a team to work together to complete assignments and finally get the hell out of Raccoon before the city gets Nuked off the map. The classes themselves have surprisingly good utility and a lot of personalization; You get up to two passive abilities per character class, and can choose one of three special abilities per mission. For example, as a Recon, you can choose to get motion-sensors that you can throw, a cloaking device to sneak around, or a disguise unit that allows you to mimic enemy troops using a hololithic projector. All of this paired with a diverse weapons locker and a surprisingly deep combat system allows players to get surprising utility out of just about every class and find the one that works best for them. If you don't have 4 players, don't despair - the computer will fill in for the missing members, though it, in traditional Gears of War style, can't revive other players if they die (because it would make the game laughably easy to solo grind). By and large, it's an action-oriented, survival-focused team-based game that encourages players to work together, and thus far has been a total blast to play with friends.

As someone who hated the direction that the Resident Evil series took after RE3, I find this new direction the series took intriguing and interesting, offering lots of new potential for things in the series itself should ORC's canon find its own settling point. I approve of it.


Using a Zombie as a human zombie shield is a great option for defense from the front, and can help you avoid getting shot.

The combat system in ORC is extremely robust. A well-done melee system allows you to perform knife slashes, takedowns, and even capture Zombies for use as human zombie shields. Every character also has a special close-combat kill at their disposal, often with a special effect - Beltway's, for example, crams a grenade in an enemy's mouth, whereas Vector's allows him to instantly assume an enemy's disguise if he kills a soldier with it, even if he doesn't have that power equipped! All of this is backed by a very diverse load of weapons - all manner of pistols, rifles, shotguns, SMGs, and more can be found, as well as 3 different kinds of grenades and whatever the special ability of your chosen character enables. Some of these are decidedly non-combat (such as Spectre's ability to see through walls), but others are hilariously awesome in combat, such as Beltway's Mines, Lupo's Incendiary Shells, or Four Eyes' ability to fire hypogun darts that turn Zombies or Soldiers into allied Crimson Heads that then fight on your behalf.

Yes, that is exactly as awesome as it sounds.


OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK

ORC manages to blend survival-horror with strategic combat in a way that the whole is tastier than its ingredients. After years of fighting decidedly-not-zombies and seeing the series take a dramatic turn towards total global masturbation, it's almost surreal to see the new approach that ORC takes towards employing both classic monsters of RE fame and throwing new content our way. The Special Operations soldiers are tough as balls, armed with powerful guns, and can engage you from afar - but they are as vulnerable to the monsters as you are. By shooting or stabbing enemies, you can sometimes cause them to bleed - bleeding foes are immediately smelled by the Zombies and B.O.W.s, who make a beeline towards the wounded and enter a frenzied state as they try to bring low their victim with clawings and bites.

Zombies and other foes can also infect you with the virus; if you become infected, your health slowly begins to tick away, and if you die whilst infected, you come back as a computer-controlled zombie. Infection can be halted through the use of antiviral sprays, or slowed through the use of antibiotic hypos from the Medic, but if this isn't an option, you can try to kill the infected player - this will let you revive them, though they'll count as having a death on their counter, which means less EXP gained for them if you do this. They'll also drop valuable items such as heavy weapons, cardkeys or data they're carrying, which means it's often in the players' best interest to cure Infected allies ASAP. Hilariously, even if a player does become a Zombie (and thus is not controllable), there's more potentially in store - as Four Eyes, Antipothis, in a game we played together, used an Induction Hypo on a Zombified Teammate, who then, as a Crimsonhead, ran around killing zombies until he finally collapsed and we could revive him properly. In another solo game later, I was by myself when a Zombified teammate decided to start some shit with a Hunter, and distracted the critter long enough for me to get to a better position. This is good, as B.O.W.s in ORC are extremely dangerous, capable of soaking huge amounts of fire and doing considerable damage - but each with their own weak spots, advantages, and disadvantages for smart players to take advantage of. Tougher B.O.W.s can be tough to even realize you're hurting unless you have a teammate running Biometric Vision - but each will die if you exploit their vulnerable spots and focus fire as a team.

Completing missions earns you EXP, which you can spend both to upgrade your character(s) and to buy new weapons - both of which improve your survival chances. A ranking system shows how far along you are, and 4 difficulties and a big emphasis on multiplayer goes a long way to make up for the fact that the campaign's on the short side - as does a promised free second Campaign to come out in about a month.


Teamwork is a beautiful thing.

The environments are lifted from RE2 and RE3, but updated beautifully, and very nicely show the horrors of a city gone mad. Signs of carnage are everywhere, and the city is literally falling apart as everyone is either dead, undead, or trying to kill you. The atmosphere in the game is chilling and repressive, with a lot of care given to fleshing out the environments - clearly the poorest areas in Raccoon City were among the hardest hit, and you see constant reminders of just how insane the situation has become. Characterization for the USS is pretty damned solid, though the introduction of Leon and the others is a little off-putting at first since the first thing he does is run the hell away. The Police Station area was a huge nostalgia trip, and the locations make good use of terrain to hide all sorts of secrets for those who choose to go looking.

The game isn't all good - the graphics look grainy, the Frag Grenade/Mine explosions look weak, and perhaps most notably, the game has some internal issues. Enemies have high solidity, as do teammates, so blocked doors or situations where you need to bowl past an enemy using a charge attack happen fairly often, and computer teammates can be utterly enfuriating if they all decide to occupy the doorway of a Conference Room you'd like to check out some time this decade. There's one area in Level 1 where you need to back up and shoot the eye of William Birkin to hold him at bay, and due to a glitch, you can't reposition the camera for that one fight (thankfully not a huge deal, but very annoying).

The AI deserves a short note of its own for being a major point of contention - comp-controlled allies are not terribly good shots and not terribly intelligent fighters, though Sheva was far more useless in RE5 than any of the USS are when played by the computer, so I'd chalk that off as progress, since Sheva got herself killed in my runthrough of RE5 a few billion times, and at least in ORC, I can choose to ignore my computer-controlled teammates if they go down and not be punished for it. Enemy soldier AI and unit AI is good, however, with Hunters actively trying to pursue weakened or isolated team members, and SpecOps soldiers actively trying to coordinate to bring you down. Terrain issues are a bit of a problem, but no worse than other games of the genre, with the only weapons being religiously difficult to get the most out of being the sniper weapons due to their massive kick and tendency to jerk about when firing.

That said, however, this is still a good game, and definitely ranks as above-average. If you're interested in an new-school romp through an old-school territory and with many familiar faces, and some very interesting and witty ideas behind it, giving this game a try is recommended. It's most assuredly not perfect (and if what you're looking for is perfection, then what the fuck are you doing looking at my blog?), but it is a fun game to play with friends and has some very clever ideas going into it, both of which are extremely appealing. Don't buy into the hype - check it out yourself and see!

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You know, I've said for a while now that one of Square-Enix's biggest failings was hubris. They'll make excellent, fun games, but then undermine them through a lack of support. They'll have IPs with excellent state-side staying power (Front Mission, Seiken Densetsu, Ehrgeiz, Bushido Blade, SaGa), but then never port them to the states citing a lack of interest. Nevermind the fact that titles ported to the states of the above do phenomenally well (such as Front Mission DS selling out within a week), Square just has no interest in releasing games that would sell like hot-cakes served extra-hot with extra-hot-cake sauce during a hotcake famine - no, everything must be centered around its "core" IPs. As an example of how stupid this practice is, SaGa II for DS and Seiken Densetsu 3 for SNES are both some of the most popular and beloved games of their console - but you'd never know it outside of ROMs and Piracy, because Square had no interest in ever releasing them outside of fucking Japan. Yes, let's ignore the fact that these games rank among the most enduring and beloved titles of all time - clearly, Squeenix knows better than its entire customer-base.

For a while I've made fun of this practice, gnashed my teeth over it, and out-and-out mocked it, but it's only now, in an interview with Square's CEO, that I've had every single bad thing I've ever said about this company 100% justified. Did you enjoy The World Ends With You, or Legend of Mana? How about The Bouncer, or Tobal No. 1? Were you a fan of Dissidia or Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime? How about Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker or Joker II?

Fuck you, then. Square-Enix has no interest in you. Buy Final Fantasy or get the fuck out, you worthless vagrant. Hope you enjoyed those ground-breaking titles, because they're never going to show up again.

You can get a good synopsis of how flamingly stupid this is in the following video, released by someone far more intelligent and capable than me. Enjoy:

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I've had a long history with the Resident Evil Series, but it's had a sort of interesting - and to an observer, oddly fascinating timeline of utter self-destruction. From the first game, widely considered one of the first "big" scary games to hit a console, onwards through Resident Evil 2 and 3, we saw that the series had a hell of a lot of win to offer. The voice-acting kind of sucked, some plot-points didn't fit right, but by and large, it was a decent series plot-wise.

Somehow, between Resident Evil 3 and the present, however, we got increasingly absurd, and based on JPG's insight, I decided to look into the origins of this. Sit right back, then, gentle readers, and harken to a tale of the Resident Evil franchise's slow-boat to self-destruction in Resident Evil 5 as far as the plot is concerned. Enjoy!


Birth of a Franchise: Resident Evil 1:
Ah, RE1. I don't think there's a single game that has had such  a lasting impression on me as this. From the first time I played it back on PSX, stayed up until 2AM playing, and had trouble sleeping for months afterward, I was hooked. Resident Evil 1 had a remarkably good plot for a game so simple; You're with a special police team looking into what looks like the work of a group of seriously disturbed fucks, arrive in the middle of an unintentional kill-zone, and are then in for the fight of your life against bloodthirsty mutants and Zombies. Your exploration leads you to discover that the mansion grounds are the site of a clandestine laboratory, that there was an accident, and you are now comprehensively fucked. You quickly find that the landing zone that got attacked was anything but accidental, that a traitor is in STARS, and that Umbrella, a global pharmaceutical firm has been involved in all manner of unpleasant research. The mansion gets blown up but good, the outbreak is seemingly contained, and your team (or what's left of 'em) survive. All in all, self-contained and a decent story. Not winning any awards for being expressly ground-breaking, but still good overall within the context of its own story. Many questions are left unanswered, and the game, overall, is quite competent.
The Remakes built on this nicely; they kept what made the story of the original effective. Which will be ironic when you see what preceded it.


The Advance - Resident Evil 2:
RE2 is the single most re-made and re-released Resident Evil game. By all accounts, some 16 different versions of it exist on PC, PSX, Saturn, N64, and many, many others. Hell, six versions of the game exist for Playstation ALONE, with the Dual Shock version being only the most recent of many. RE2 also had a very bizarre development cycle; the game was functionally made twice, with the original (and far scarier, to be frank) game re-done entirely. Part of this was due to the limitations of the original Resident Evil's engine (couldn't shoot falling/getting up enemies), and part of it was because the developers weren't happy with how RE2's original release was panning out. Rather than go with the original idea, the development team took an enormous risk and completely remade the game. To their credit, RE2 was well-done and looked and played well. To their discredit, what they had originally assembled looked to be a much smexier game overall. This is something Mouse noted earlier, which is that Capcom has a notorious tendency to kill its own franchises and/or guide them in stupid directions (see the last entry in this article), but in the case of Resident Evil 2, it actually worked.
RE2's plot was basic: Claire Redfield comes to Raccoon to visit her brother, nonethewiser that the Zombocalypse has begun. Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop, likewise heads to the RCPD for his first (and last) day on the job. Now in way over their heads, they must deal with a city gone insane and escape this hellhole they've found themselves in. In their drive to escape, they, as was the case in RE1, found out more about what caused this, Claire adopted Sherry Birkin, and Leon found (and lost) love. All very touching in its own right.
RE2 was where we first saw the plot holes begin to emerge, but they were small and largely innocuous: Birkin seemingly injected himself with the G-Virus knowing what it would do, though this could have been the last desperate action of a dying man. Irons got away with some sick hobbies, but there's ample evidence to suggest that people who got wise to him were quietly disposed of, and that Irons himself was paid very well to ensure that the RCPD couldn't do jack and shit when the Zombie Apocalypse began. 2 characters meant a longer game, though the canon plot-direction is Claire A, Leon B. RE2 left a lot of doors open: Raccoon had been escaped, and Birkin was left to rot, but the City was left behind.


Upped Ante - Resident Evil 3:
Resident Evil 3 is my favorite RE game - and with good fucking reason: It got everything right and so fucking little wrong. As opposed to RE1 and RE2, which focused on scaring you using claustrophobic environments and nowhere to run, Resident Evil 3 knew how to fuck with you even harder - the whole city is infected, and you have far scarier things to worry about than just Zombies. As Jill Valentine, you try to escape the city, only to learn that a creature called Nemesis is actively trying to hunt your ass down and make you fucking dead. And whereas Zombies are one thing, and BOWs quite another, Nemesis is an intelligent foe and will chase you through open doors. Using a fucking rocket launcher. And with one of the most iconic fucking growls in gaming history. RE3 was scary because everywhere was turned into a hell-on-earth - there were no safe spots, not even in save rooms. Nemesis could pursue you anywhere. And where Nemesis wasn't, monsters continued to exist - Zombies and Hunters and worse. Raccoon done got itself thrown into the Zombocalypse, and once more, we were still in Raccoon City - during RE2 - but this time, from Jill's perspective.
RE3 added depth: Umbrella saw a chance in the ongoing hell-on-earth scenario, and sent in a team of Mercs - mostly hired from 3rd-world PMCs and scooped out of prisons for war crimes - then threw 'em into the proverbial meat-grinder on a mission to "rescue civilians." In truth, they were sent there to die, and to provide combat data for the BOWs against an organized combat unit. Jill meets up with one of the UBCS, Carlos, and the two try to get the fuck out of dodge - which they do, with help from Barry Burton, from RE1. Raccoon is finally sterilized - with crushing finality - by a nuclear strike from the US Government.
RE3 was genius - it kept to the proud traditions set forth in RE1 and 2, in that it told a good, effective story without getting too absurd. Nemesis' deployment makes sense for the same reason Mr. X's deployment earlier in RE2 did - a BOW with a specific mission task - which was made all the more effective by Nemesis' inflection and mannerisms. Carlos, Mikhail, and Nikolai, likewise, made for interesting characters who were surprisingly well-grounded (depending on how you progress through the game, you can find out more about the former two, with the latter having development as part of a major plot element).  Carlos presents you with a protagonist who wound up in over his head, Mikhail a battle-scarred and haunted veteran who was critically injured by a Hunter and who has a crowning moment of awesome on his way out. RE3 didn't bring anything stupid to the table, and a good time was had by all.


Downfall - Resident Evil: Code Veronica:
Fuck this game.
So fucking much.
All of the stupid we would later see in RE4 and 5, all the bullshit we saw in Outbreak, and all the miscellaneous silliness we'd come to know and mock the Resident Evil series for had its origins, by and large, in this piece of shit. The intro tells you everything you need to know: It's a babbling, incoherent mess that makes Claire out to be an action hero and shows minimal relation to any real-world scenario - Claire has been sent to a prison island after trespassing in a laboratory complex in an attempt to find her missing brother. Canon, of course, lists that Chris was being grilled by the US government regarding everything he knew about the Raccoon incident, which means that Claire either isn't very well-informed or isn't very smart. In her escape (in which she's shot at by a fucking helicopter), Claire kills 10 people before finally getting captured. Where I'm from, killing 10 people when trespassing on their property gets you sent here, and possibly to here, but in Code Veronica, it gets her sent to super happy special secret prison run by Umbrella.
This game would have been over a lot quicker if Umbrella had just turned Claire over to police.
Sadly, that's just the start. Claire winds up on an island run by an effiminate maniac, tries to escape the island with a completely unlikable dickass named Steve, winds up going to Antarctica, then getting her vehicle smashed by tentacles. And then we get to play as Chris, who has found Rockfort Island and decided that, rather than handle this the correct way (you know - getting the fucking government involved), he's going to be a badass and go in on his own, fight a bunch of Hunters, get owned by Wesker, who has matrix powers now, Fly to Antarctica in a Harrier, which is so beyond that craft's flight range it's hilarious, before shooting down an ant-woman with a laser cannon. Chris saves Claire, and the two fly off in the Harrier that was never refueled.
God fucking damn it. Nothing in this game fits as far as plot goes. Whereas Resident Evil 1-3 had something resembling believability as far as its plot goes (insofar about a plot with Zombie Viruses goes, but I digress), Code Veronica just said "Fuck that" and decided to go well into the realm of ridiculous. Not only was Code Veronica not scary in the slightest, and not only was it patently ridiculous in many spots (even by RE standards), it brought to the table the ridiculous bullshit that we would see in the later games. Resident Evil 4 would momentarily redeem it for a time (since a lot of the insanity could be pawned off on the cult group Los Illuminados, pushing silliness back) before RE5 brought us back to lunacy with a vengeance.
Putting it basically, Code Veronica is what ruined Resident Evil in much the same way that A Serbian Film ruined Movies.

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Crossposted from what's left of RTS-Sanc.

A long time ago - about 1997, really - about when the 32-bit era was upon us and the Playstation was the next big thing - a time before Nintendo would wander into an ill-advised foray into insanity with the N64, and before the Internet was the unstoppable force it is now, there was a time when gaming magazines actually had a spot of relevance and value.

Shocking, I'm aware, but there's a place and time where mags like GamePro were a go-to source of cuttting-edge news and game info. Before big companies could intimidate with threats of blacklistings, antagonize news agencies into giving games that sucked favorable reviews, or could force reviewers to review games by competitors in a less-than-friendly light (such as Konami blacklisting any review site that mentioned Metal Gear Solid 4's cutscene-to-gameplay ratio, the infamous Kane and Lynch: Dead Men fiasco, or the infamous example of G4 putting a biased, Wii-hating reviwer to review Zelda: Twilight Princess). A time when gaming news, to a degree, actually did its job for a change and didn't force us to sweep about for good online news sources. A time before GameFAQs and later Game Wikis made innumerable OSGs irrelevant. It was also a place for companies to advertise games and controllers and such, many of which would prove to suck at some point, and several of which would not.

And it was one of these ads that would give me my first look at X-COM - UFO Defense.

The ad for X-COM was a full-page colored add, utterly dominated by the really cheesy Playstation release of X-COM's box art. Looking at this art, I remembered seeing how campy it looked, and immediately thinking: "There's a game whose box art probably doesn't portray the game itself." The screenshots it had, all the way at the bottom, were tiny - way too small to make out anything clearly other than an isometric 3D viewpoint and a map of the world - but it wasn't the screenies that got me interested - it was a fairly sizable block of text explaining the game's premise.

TL;DR, it explained in the not-so-distant future, Aliens have invaded and declared war on planet earth. You are in charge of a multi-national task-force known as X-COM, which is dedicated to repelling the Alien threat. Seek out and find UFO activity across the globe, send out fighter craft to shoot them down, then send in teams to fight their way to the crash site and recover the UFO. From there, you can research what you've recovered, and eventually, learn to use the aliens' own advanced technology against them, and from there, work
towards pushing them back to whatever planet they came from.

Ireally don't know how to describe how weird it was, back in the 90s, to see a text box that explained the game's synopsis - such was common of Commodore ads from the era, but then, Microprose had been around that long. It was, irregardless, quite jarring; most game ads simply had THIS GAME RULES AND IF YOU DO NOT BUY IT I WILL COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND TAKE A CRAP IN YOUR MOUTH. I mean hell, MOST advertising circa that time period was more-or-less along those lines:


See?

So... Yeah. Seriously. An ad that actually went and said "This is our game and this is its premise!" was, at the time, liberating. So fawking often in those days (and indeed, to this very day), we have 1-5 word blurbs on ads and similar on the back of game boxes themselves. Go on, try finding a game you own in the last few years that so much as has a single paragraph detailing the game in any way, shape, or form on the back of the box. I can virtually guarantee that you can count those that do one one goddamned hand (I did, and I own nearly 20 XBox 360 games).

Microprose was never that pretentious. You fawkwads in marketing should take note.

Mind, before you slam me for reviewing the console edition, you need to bear in mind that, like many, I didn't have a good comp in these days... Indeed, I only had an IBM PS/2 in 1998, so that was that. But the game had just come out on PSX, and it was among the first titles I purchased. Over the next 2 years, it would be my single most-played PSX title until Final Fantasy Tactics was released. As for X-COM itself, it was a hybrid game of sorts, integrating brutally uncomprimising turn-based strategy with a non-combat-mode "Geoscape" mode for building bases, buying/selling things, assigning research, and so on, but this short description doesn't quite do X-COM justice, and a full analysis of the game itself is needed as a result. What does need to be noted before I review this proper, however, is that X-COM was released during the Playstation's infancy. This is noteworthy, because the PSX's design specifics, at the time, were completely on-par with many modern PC designs. As such, the Playstation recieved a wealth of ports of PC Games. Some of these, such as Command and Conquer, or (god help us all) Dune 2000 weren't so great on their console releases, being pale imitations of their PC Counterparts - but one underlying trait of direct ports of this time was that the overwhelming majority were Pixel-perfect, and never dumbed-down for the Consolefags.

You want to argue with me that console games have never been as good as their PC counterparts, you can go right ahead, but insofar as the PSX, you'd be dead wrong. There was a time that Console owners didn't lose out for not having good PCs, and didn't have their games needlessly dumbed-down. Quake 2, Doom, and Final Doom on PSX were nothing short of pixel-perfect ports (with added content, in the case of the middle, as part of the bargain), as were both Descent and its sequel, ported to PSX as Descent Maximum. Go on, assnuggets, try explaining to Lor that Doom on PSX wasn't amazing. He'll laugh his ass off before banhammering you or at least warning you into last tuesday.

...This isn't to say it was all good, mind you - Duke Nukem 3D and Dark Forces ran comparatively sluggishly on PSX, and Hexen for PSX was an abortion - but by and large, if you could run it on PC, it found its way to Playstation without being dumbed-down. In this regard, X-COM was a priceless rare gem of this time-period; it was actually featured a large number of improvements for the Playstation console, which included working difficulty settings (by default, the PC version always gives you beginner setting in X-COM), animated vehicle and UFO entries in the UFOPedia, dramatically-improved AI, a slight graphic revamp, a massive sound revamp, and even numerous new cutscenes added, including an absolutely awesome game over sequence.

But as for the game itself? Oh, it was undeniably one of the best titles ever made.



Known as UFO: Enemy Unknown for our friends across the pond, X-COM: UFO Defense was a game that delivered on every promise from its advertisement, and then some. Without any doubt, it is one of the quintessential "must have" titles that defined a generation of strategy-gamers. Long before Games-Workshop released anything that wasn't utter fail, X-COM had done turn-based strategy, and far better than most. Long before Civilization had really taken off, X-COM had been there and done that. And it kicked ass.

To truly understand X-COM, one needs to be walked through the very beginning of it. The very beginning of the game begins with you deciding where to build your first base; Where you build is entirely up to you. Many players start in the US (which contributes the most cash), whilst others choose a "hub" locale with lots of outlying cities to cover, such as Europe. Irregardless, once our first base is set down, we name it, and we're about ready to play. We begin the game with a fairly large base with most of the facilities needed to get one started; there are an enormous number of structures you can build at a given base, and our new base does need some additional structures to bring it up to Alien-busting snuff. We need an Alien Containment unit in order to have a place to keep any live Aliens we recover (otherwise we have to kill the live ones), a long-range radar would be a good addendum, and we could probably afford to have some more personnel working the base.


The Base Edit Menu.

Feeling overwhelmed? Don't. X-COM has an exhaustive, built-in encyclopedia of game-info (known as the UFOPEDIA) that holds data on everything you currently have access to and have learned. Everything from info on X-COM Structures, aircraft, infantry weapon systems, Tanks, and more can be found here, as can all information on Aliens, their technology, and so forth once researched.

Back to the base. We can now assign researchers to projects, be they human-theorized technologies like Laser Weapons, or any Alien Technology or such we recover. We can then traipse on over and outfit our aircraft how we want. Everything about the vehicles and personnel we use is customizable to a degree. When everything's set up, it's time to go to the Geoscape Map, set the timer for "1 Hour" and await for our first UFO to show. The chance, at first, is small; Radar only has a certain % chance of detecting UFOs when they arrive. Later technology will enable you to find them first-time, every time, and to a much further-out range.


Engage!

A UFO has been found? Excellent. Time to intercept. We send one of our fighters after it, and (god willing), shoot it the fruit down. Failing this, we can wait for the UFO to land, and assault the landing site directly. Whether we go for a crash site or landing site, however, it's time to prepare the ground assault. We send in a transport craft with a team of soldiers, and it's here that we encounter the game's turn-based strategy mechanic, and arguably one of the best parts of the game. We now must mount a ground assault, sending men in to exterminate or stun the Aliens, and capture the UFO. These missions range from laughably easy to mind-shatteringly difficult, depending on the mission, UFO type, and Alien race involved. Moving and shooting (and meleeing, if you have a Stun Rod) uses Time Units (TUs), as does moving items in your inventory, prepping/throwing grenades, and so on. You move your entire squad, then the aliens do.

Combat is unbelievably lethal at first. The early Aliens, the Sectoids (basically Grays) are weak and die easily, but the weapons they pack are capable of virtually invariably reducing one of your soldiers to a sludgy paste in a single shot. As later technologies allow you to use the Medi-Kit (to stop your men from bleeding out) and eventually gain access to varying forms of body armor, combat becomes somewhat less-lethal as the game progresses - at least for your soldiers, at a glance - but the game never ceases to be challenging and never stops finding ways to creep you out. Your Alien foes are not limited to just superior firepower; some of them are Psionic, capable of psychic attacks that can cause panic, rage, or even force them to submit to Alien control entirely, turning on their former comrades.

You'd be surprised at how scary these combat missions can be.


Let's move in, people!

Once you salvage the UFO (god willing), any surviving soldiers gain skills and rank ups. With time, your weaker soldiers can be made far stronger. You can now research the technology you recovered, which may be either a veritable arsenal if you got lucky and salvaged a landed UFO or minimally-damaged one, or may be relatively little, with the UFO a smoldering wreck, most technology it had destroyed, and potentially its entire crew dead (if so, lucky you, you won a freebie). Research is essential; it lets you use Alien weapons, find out how their abilities work (and how to turn them on themselves), find out more about your foes, and eventually figure out the keys to their plans, where they come from, and work towards kicking their Alien asses and ending this war once and for all, before they destroy or enslave of all of Earth! At the end of each month, you get graded based on your performance; your sponsors then give you more money. If you do very well, they may increase their funding! Beware, however - the Aliens may try underhanded tactics to destroy governmental support for X-COM, and if your performance sucks for too long, the X-COM project will be terminated entirely, ergo damning humanity to alien enslavement due to beurocracy.

So don't let that happen.

It's not all "Shoot down UFOs, research, hire new soldiers to replace those that died, rinse repeat" however. Many other things will occur that demand direct or indirect attention. As the alien invasion kicks up to full swing, the first base you made will not be sufficient. You will need to expand, secure funding (Scientists and Engineers cost a buttload to maintain), aggressively go after certain ships for supplies, and target specific aliens for capture for the eggheads to interrogate so as to dismantle their plans writ large. You will need to find new weapons to outfit your craft with (so they may attack larger UFOs), and new craft entirely when these prove insufficient.


An assault on the Alien base meets with disaster.

But it is only later on that the most infamous of the Alien offensives come into play. Eventually, the Aliens will begin attempting to establish bases of their own, from which to launch further attacks. These bases are well-fortified, have dozens of aliens, well-equipped and well-trained. Even worse than these are attacks on your very bases - the Aliens may try to destroy your bases outright with an assault on one of yours in return! If successful, you'll lose the base - Base defense missions, as such, are to the death. But the worst of all of these areTerror Sites - locations in which Aliens are attacking civilian population centers to sow death and terror amongst the civilian population and weaken X-COM's public support. These Terror Sites will always see the most ferocious of creatures, and the most horrific of aliens you'll see. These last 3 mission types are invariably the ones that cause players the most paranoia and many are definitely nightmare fuel; there's something very Space Hulk about the base missions, while Terror Sites have civilians that can get killed.

Your X-COM unit has access to (expensive but useful) tanks, but the Aliens have their own counterparts in the form of Terror Creatures.These beasts are only seen when raiding an Alien Base, dealing with a Base Attack, dealing with a Terror Site, or attacking the 2 biggest UFO types. These creatures are as bizarre as they are powerful, ranging from miniaturized UFOs used as combat drones (Cyberdiscs), to the much-feared and much-hated Chryssalid, a terror creature which can only attack in melee, but injects its victim with a poison that renders it agibbering, psychotic wreck - as well as an quick-hatching egg. With one attack, it can reduce an X-COM Agent to a mildly dangerous zombie-like drone, which, when killed (or after a certain time elapses), causes a fully-grown Chryssalid to horrifically burst from its host, shredding away its host's ruined form to join the battle and infect others. This was especially nasty on the PSX version, where you were treated to a graphically-remastered (and gorier) sequence of the Chryssalid bursting out of its victim.

High-Octane Nightmare Fuel = Very Yes.


Oh, fruit me.

Inevitably, you find where the Aliens are coming from, and must send an assault to their homeworld and end the bastards once and for all. You also need a ship capable of interplanetary travel. This battle is a one-off affair; either you succeed, or humanity is fawked.

I state again that even my synopsis here does not, remotely, do this game justice. It has a depth of tactics and strategic options that go well beyond my ability to describe in the breadth of one singular post. It was such a great game that a sequel came out that was, functionally, a total remix and rehash of the first game, but with a secret war no one truly knew about regarding a threat from below the seas (the incredibly hard X-COM: Terror From the Deep). X-COM: Apocalypse emerged some time later, an all-new take on an existing theme, with several bold new steps taken. Whilst not the creepy, horrific, and atmospheric wunderkind that X-COM and its sequel were, Apocalypse still kicked ass.

It's sad. Games like this aren't made anymore; when Microprose was bought up by Hasbro, the latter ran it face-first directly into the ground, releasing X-COM: Enforcer and X-COM: Interceptor. After Hasbro was done raping the license to death, they sold it. Some spiritual successors to X-COM exist (such as UFO: Aftermath), and while these games are good, they are nothing but pale imitations of what once was possible, and all purists openly acknowledge this. Perhaps someday, we will see a true remake of the game, made to exploit what we now can do in terms of computer technology, but for now, the best you can do is DLing the Windows version that was just released
on Steam.

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