Finally finished a save I had started like 10 months ago which now allows me to put it right here in the ol' Backloggd.

I'm 36 at the time of writing this, and I went to tell y'all younger folks about something called Shareware. Back in the day, we kinda sorta had two different types of Not-The-Full-Game experiences: demos and shareware. A demo back in the day was what a demo is now; a limited, small chunk of the game. And then there was shareware, which was ostensibly the entire game, but you only got to play a portion of it until you paid. Think of it like a sort of Freemium thing that we've got nowadays.

Anywho, to a kid like me--and I would imagine lots of PC gaming kids back in the day--shareware made up the bulk of what we experienced: the first levels of Commander Keen, the first chapter of Doom, the bits of Escape Velocity before you get blown up by a Parrot. You'd get these games from various discs (floppy discs, mind, but sometimes CDs) and just play whatever came your way.

It was the shareware of X-Com that more or less completely changed the way my brain worked.

There's a concept in TTRPGs, particularly in LARP, called "bleed." Bleed more or less refers to the degree to which you like, feel like your character(s), or the degree to which you're fully emotionally invested in them. There are low-bleed players and high-bleed players, and while I don't necessarily think that high or low bleed necessarily equates to something like immersion, I think there is a way that high-bleed folks can feel more attuned to their characters and games.

I've always been an incredibly high-bleed player, not just of TTRPGs, but of video games too. I need to feel a degree of emotional connection in order to even remotely care. This took the form of me talking out loud to myself as a kid "in character" as, say, an X-Wing pilot while playing X-Wing/TIE Fighter, or as Beatrice the Knight hero in HoMM3 or as the squadron commander of a group of hapless alien-fighting morons in X-Com.

Because of my high degree of bleed, I prefer games that are crunchy; I love when a game gives me levers and buttons and knobs to push and press and pull and manage. I love a base building system, I love an economy, I love to customize things and manage things and name things. X-Com gives you control over everything. The first thing you see when you start a new game is the globe--THE WHOLE PLANET! You can put your first base anywhere you want! Then you've got a whole base to build, you've got things to research, individual soldiers with their own stats and inventories to manage, fighter planes to deploy--it's everything. X-Com hands you an entire world that you get to mess with and says, "good luck!" And then it lets you do it all however you want.

It's simply a masterpiece of a game, and is still more or less unparalleled. The remakes--both 1 and 2--scratch the same itch, but as the saying goes, "you can't go home again."

Nothing will ever be like the OG X-Com.

Very fun, though takes a while to complete, at least for me. I love this game so far, it's really awesome :)

Edit: Since the initial review I had works really hard to finishing the game, which was made difficult with an old bug that was shipped with the game where it interpreted more moderate difficulties to wanting the highest and hardest of all! So to actually complete it, I had to play at a lower difficulty, but I feel no shame in that as I still had a lot of fun and I feel some of the mechanics of this game hadn't aged too well as I covered when revising my review of the sequel.

At times I feel like when it says a soldier or alien can see someone, the person it still hidden in darkness and I often can't see them, having to rely on the cursor changing colour when targeting a square the enemy is in and sometimes it's not the main one I wish to aim at, but to take out the far more dangerous one equipped with a psionic amp.

The story, as I hope everyone should know, is that the Earth is being invaded by aliens and a taskforce is formed with funding from all the different nations around the world. However, if they do not see a change or you lack behind in saving people and taking down UFOs, they may choose to reduce or even end their funding entirely and that'll be the end of them and you will never be able to regain any funding again from them in the future, limiting the amount of funding you can have and causing a handicap.

One of the things this game did above the newer, successful, version by 2K is that you get the full gore with the autopsy which seems to be easier to get away with because it's pixelated, where as the others are essentially the same animation, but with a different alien.

I loved learning and reading up the alien's biology and getting a good idea as to why they would benefit from taking over this world and some of the disturbing parts of the aliens themselves, like how the "Snakemen" are filled with eggs that are reproduced asexually and if left to their own devises, could easily out-populate the planet in a short time-span. Or how the Etherials' bodies are severally underdeveloped in every part of their body, apart from their brain having great psionic abilities and is essentially the only real functioning organ in their bodies.

The lore for this game is really something and you may even miss some bits of it, depending on how good you actually are at catching the aliens and in vanilla form, the game itself doesn't require you to catch every single alien or all of the aliens of multiple different ranks to unlock everything necessary to strike back at the aliens and end the game in the one final attack.

I was also excited to learn years later of a opensource modding program, allowing you to modify this and the following game into a whole new experience! For those interested in wanting to play more classic X-COM without having to replay the same game over and over again, I highly recommend you check out this forum and website for all the mods and how to install them!

My favourite of the Megamods is X-Piratez, but I'm sure all of your could have fun looking up these mods for yourself and having your own fun. Maybe even getting involved in the modding community too!

Openxcom Forums

Mod.io/openxcom

Nothing short of a miracle of design. It could have been just a damn good tactical combat game, but they decided they wanted more. Instead, we get an extremely in-depth simulation about micromanaging your organization and the combat missions, and both sides are extremely good. The feedback between both sides is great too, as you frantically research the alien technology in hopes of fighting back the continually ramping up band of goons you face, which basically culminates in aliens that entirely turn your own squad against itself (Ethereals and Chryssalids) causing you to consider every single element even more carefully. Let's get this out of the way; if you want X-COM, there is no better game to play than X-COM in regards to what it does.

This all said, this game suffers from issues primarily tied to its longevity. Ships you see start being the same, individual troops get so powerful you can just send them in to kill out entire squads, the alien roster becomes predictable and the research feels meaningless. While I like the idea of hitting dead-ends, outside of the Flying Suit it rarely felt like any of the equipment I got was noticeably a huge improvement past the early game and it's only a problem because even the good stuff you research often feels a bit trivial as time goes on. It's worsened by the time you've realized that you've seen pretty much every consistent ship layout so every mission just becomes "send my one guy in and kill everyone unless there's a chryssalid in which case fuck time for my entire team to die." If campaigns weren't so long this would be a significantly better game IMO, but beggars can't be choosers; what exists here, in its current form, is still amazing and worth a play if any of the bullet points here interest you and you haven't played it. I fucking hate Chryssalids.

I think this is the pinnacle of turn base strategy games. Everything after this felt lackluster in some way or another.

This game is unique in almost every single way. It allows you to equip your soldiers in any way you want, take up to 40 soldiers to missions (or only 1), you can destroy all the buildings you find, set grenades to detonate far in the future.

This is balanced for the early-mid game. If you take too many soldiers you will spend a lot of money equipping them, the more you have the easier is for one to lose moral, drop everything (even primed grenades) and flee, maybe killing other, more important, soldiers.

Late game is a different story, both you and the aliens are overpowered. They can mind control your soldiers if they have a low psy ability. You can fire missiles that moves in a pattern defined by you, if those hit an enemy you will kill it and probably every enemy around it.

Overall, the best strategy experience I had in any game.

First of all, you need OpenXcom, it's free and it runs much more smoothly than DOSBox while also providing extra settings, quality of life improvements and bug fixing for issues still present in the final official build. This game is DRM free, but if you want to run OpenXcom from Steam like I do just delete the Dosbox executable in the game's folder and rename the OpenXcom one as "dosbox".
X-COM: UFO Defense is a game about fighting back an alien invasion, the aforementioned invaders don't hold back and you'll most likely lose a large amount of rookie soldiers to the most basic enemies during the first couple of months. The aliens play dirty too, relying on terrorism and infiltration in addition to their already formidable brute strength.
As the commander of X-COM, you must unearth the secrets of their technology, set up bases around the world, manufacture weapons of immense power and rain death over the godless alien savages that seek to enthrall humanity. Failure means a fate worse than death so no resource can be spared and human life is merely an instrument you can repeatedly purchase for $40.000.
I love this game, it's so tense, specially at the beginning, but that only makes it all the more satisfying when the tables turn. The alien forms are varied and even the most basic ones can be very dangerous, the encounters are procedurally generated to keep things fresh, and there's always a new facility to build, a new research to start or something to manufacture.
The combat is very meticulous in the sense that you have a high degree of control over your troops, the game uses time units which can be spent freely during the player's turn, there isn't a hard "move + action" limit like so many strategy games have and it's possible to do all kinds of creative stuff with inventory management.
A lot of people have nostalgia for this title, but this game is older than me so nostalgia is not a factor. I think X-COM is still as good as it was back in 1994 and a must play for strategy fans, my only qualm about it is that this version is just plain old DOSBox which is far from ideal, but that can be fixed as I pointed out before. Fantastic game overall.