A lot can be said for older games. Without this war of graphics, developers were able to concentrate on game play making sure games are what they should be.  Fun.  I’m not against eye-popping graphics, quite the opposite i assure you. I just think that along the way they concentrated too much on the visuals and not enough on the fun aspect.

I can see why. With all this processing power at my disposal i could feasibly hack in to a fleet of alien spaceship and make them explode, unfortunately that would be retarded so instead I’d at least like to juicy visuals for my troubles.

What i want is remakes, now i usually cringe at such and idea but what i want certain games remade in 3d but nothing else changed. You heard me no fancy new weapons, no new control scheme and defiantly no Will Smith.  Luckily the DS seems to have slowly caught on with this idea with Mario and Final Fantasy but I believe its time for the PC to join in on the fun.

UFO : Enemy Unknown

Also known as X-com – UFO Defense in America, was a turn based strategy published by MicroProse back in 1993 and was the spiritual successor to Julian Gollops’ Laser Squad. The basic premise of this game  centres on increased UFO sightings, tales of abduction and acts of terrorism on the part of the insidious aliens. With each country’s individual forces unable to quell the invaders each nation pulled together to create a single unit whose job was to sole focus on the incoming threat. Thus the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-Com) was born. Here is where you take control.

The game is split up into three main parts. The geoscape, which gives you a world view and options to build bases, view alien sightings and dispatch craft to investigate crash landings, terrorsites and to intercept UFOs. With radars you’ll be able to pick up events from around the world and depending on how safe you keep certain countries and areas your sponsorship will go up allowing you to do more. Lastly you have access to the time button and although you can virtually play this part of the game in real time it is recommended when not tinking with your base to use one of the fast forward options. Just don’t set it to too fast else you’ll miss all the important events.

The Base screen is lets you build up your bases with laboratories to research, general defenses, engineering, hangers and generally everything you’ll need to defeat the aliens at your disposal. You can also but weapons and new recruits here and its it is generally a good idea to engineer the fruits of research. still you’ll have no research with out any artifacts and what not. here is where we come to the main meat of the game

Once you send a ship to a site of importance, be it a terrorsite or a crash landing, you’ll reach the Battlescape this is where the the player gets to send his soldiers against the alien forces in an isometric turn-based battle sequence. The idea being to kill or capture all the aliens in the area thus saving the nearby towns and adding important artifacts to your research.

The game builds in a very cool way but the learning curve is steep as it won;t be long until the planet is overrun buy gargantuan motherships and unless you’ve upgraded pretty much everything you’ll have much trouble taking these down.

This game was excellent, in fact it still is but try to play it with out Dosbox and you’ll be stuck in permanent fast forward also there were lots of sequels and apart from Terror from the deep, which was pretty much the same thing, they have been terrible. Truly this is a game that 2010 could do with, unchanged, just updated to 3D but this is far from the only one.

Check out part 2 for more. In the meantime here’s the intro movie.