Since starting the STSC I have read a lot of essays- whether they be submissions here, Symposium piece or Omnibus contributions back in the day.
And what I have learned during this time is that anything can make for a good essay, any topic is fair game. It all comes down to the writer taking something that they are obsessed with, something that they have thought about more than anyone else and getting the reader to share in this.
Today people quite often try and share outrage in this way but I think a far more effective method is to share memory and enthusiasm. Personally I can read about any niche hobby or interested if the writing is good and the authentic feeling is there.
I mention this because
‘s contribution here today is a perfect example of all of these things in action.Enjoy.
It’s a moonless night and and if this place was real the air would stink of burning metal, smoldering vegetation and something so vile that the ground would be covered in half-digested military rations and the poor lads and lasses who couldn't keep their food down. The alien scout ship lies flaming and smoking after our interceptor shot it down but their damn ships usually survive crashes. Their occupants are tough, too.
We send the least experienced rookie to lead the charge. Helluva choice for his first mission. Clutching his laser rifle in both hands he triggers the ground level sensor and the ship’s entry hatch slides open. The grunt charges forward, rifle pointing ahead, ready to fry anything in front of him. He looks exactly like all of the other blonde, muscular soldiers who have done this time and time again.
The darkness is suddenly banished by a violent flash and wet thuds. Three large holes the size of baseballs punch through the grunt’s torso: green balls of death penetrate him, long wet trails of blood and viscera streaming after the spheres like human-made comets. A seven foot tall alien, with green scaly skin and an emotionless red face, strides fearlessly forward, its own rifle drawn and steam rising from it. Its boot crushes the skull of Nameless Rookie with no effort.
The front of the ship lights up as the rest of the squad starts firing their rifles, trying to stop the alien before it can fire again. Streaks of orange and red pierce the night, steam and smoke obscuring the area ahead of us. When visibility returns we see the giant creature splayed on the ground, pierced and fried into a smoldering ruin.
How many more soldiers will we lose on this mission? It doesn’t matter: if X-COM falters and fails to sacrifice its own then the entire world loses.
I discovered video games during the eras of the TRS-80, the original IBM PCs and the Atari 2600 game system. The computers of the late 1980s and early 1990s barely rose above the visual quality of coloured blobs that moved like chess pieces with sounds that could have been produced by the simplest electronic keyboard. Today we expect to see and hear movies when we grab our console controllers. Times have changed.
With our sound and visual expectations set low, gameplay mechanics had to compensate to keep our attention. The early 90s in particular was a golden age for turn based play, hence the chess analogy. You moved your equivalent of digital chess pieces – they only looked like tanks, soldiers and spaceships, effectively each was a chess piece - across a board which could have been a town, a country or even the empty space between stars and planets. This was the era where Microprose briefly dominated computer gaming with classics like Civilization, Master of Orion and their sequels. Your opponent was your own computer, doing its best to prevent you from achieving your goals by throwing enemies, traps and other disasters at you. At the highest levels of difficulty your digital opponent was so difficult that a game could be over in a few minutes if you made a single mistake.
And then there was X-COM: UFO Defense (also marketed as UFO: Enemy Unknown), the sinister thief of hundreds of hours of gaming time. OK, let’s be honest, thousands of hours – X-COM had the power to remove you from your normal, everyday life and reduce you to a bleary-eyed exhausted wretch with a screaming back and a stiff neck because that was the price to pay for total engrossment.
The premise was simple: protect the world from alien invasion and grow powerful enough to defeat the aggressors on their home world. You spent your time between base management, aerial dog fights and individual sorties where your squads would wreck forests, deserts and small towns trying to kill the aliens hidden on the map and hopefully save any hapless citizens from searing alien death. Or, if you were in a more brutal mood, your soldiers would level the battlefield without regard for the people they were trying to save.
This review excerpt from The Anomalous Host describes the X-COM gaming experience perfectly:
When it comes to the original X-COM: UFO Defense game, I am terrified of playing it ever again. Not because the game is too tense for me (though it does get tense as hell). It’s because when I finally sat down one morning at about 9am or so, I went through the tutorial the game manual comes with, and made an honest effort to learn how to play the game. I successfully learned it, and continued to play it. Then the next thing I knew when I look away from the computer screen and out the window, I saw that the sun was setting. I quit the game and looked at the time, it said it was after 6pm. 9 hours went by like it was nothing, and I went through the whole day thinking I had only been playing for 3 hours. I shut the computer off and stayed way the hell away from it. Something that addicting cannot be right. I don’t think I had ever played a game that made me lose track of time that badly. That was what scared the shit out of me. And I still get that feeling whenever I boot the game back up, and I hear the terror music from that intro video which perfectly captures the tension you’re about to subject yourself to.
I remember experiencing this feeling of total immersion into a gaming experience even though the graphics and sound seem so crude these days. But by damn X-COM was so effective at what it did, through a combination of creating tension, surprise and outright terror. It made incredible use of limitations to create an engrossing gaming experience.
Sound does incredibly heavy lifting during X-COM’s combat sequences. The background music is an unrelenting pulsing of low notes regularly punctuated with a creepy higher pitched, vibrating motif that sets your nervous system tingling. The unnerving soundtrack gives you the feeling of being stalked while you work to explore the landscape around you. That’s the X-COM experience: you walk into an area virtually blind thanks to the “fog of war” and gradually expose the map before you, never knowing if your digital grunt was about to be killed by plasma fire or walk in front of an alien that was ready to rend you from chin to groin.
This was X-COM’s true strength: maximizing tension and terror by uncertainty during a turn based game. You might think you have your troops positioned safely but when the aliens get their turn, a monstrous Chrysalid might run out of nowhere and attack your solider. The Chrysalid is a particularly demoralizing opponent: instead of shooting its opponent it injects the opponent with an egg that instantly transforms your trusty soldier into a nameless zombie. Worse still, if you shoot the zombie, the egg within gestates and another Chrysalid bursts out from within the bloody wreck of a formerly human body. Not only do you lose your hapless grunt, but you effectively get two more enemies. In the early stages of the game you can only have 14 soldiers in play during a mission so this is a demoralizing blow to morale.
Soldier morale is an important mechanic in X-COM. Unlike actual chess pieces, your digital warriors apparently have feelings. When things are good your soldiers do their jobs. But as their fellow grunts are killed by the aliens their morale dips. As things worsen, the more cowardly ones (again, these really aren’t chess pieces) will panic and freeze or, even worse, they may go berserk and start randomly shooting friend or foe. This can have a horrible cascading effect, turning what seems like a successful mission into an utter disaster. It’s even worse than in the Sims when a Sim pisses itself because you didn’t let it go to the bathroom for two days.
X-COM is crudely masterful at making that knot in your stomach grow three sizes when the situation devolves into ruin and you secretly love the feeling of dread that accompanies onscreen disaster. X-COM is ostensibly a SF strategy game but its strength is evoking tension and terror with its limited tool palette. Surprise is its main weapon: surprise and fear, to quote Monty Python’s Cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition.
And then there’s the psionic abilities. Two of the alien species trying to conquer the world have the ability to take control of your soldiers. They can reduce a soldier’s morale to zero, either making it run away blindly or else start shooting everything around it. Or, worse still, the aliens can take control of a soldier’s body, turning a trusted tool into an agent of chaos that will slaughter its nearby teammates until you can take it down. It's demoralizing (yet strangely entertaining) when your digital chess piece takes out its comrades.
Maybe I’m making X-COM sound like a misery fest but there’s another side to the game: achievement. You’ll celebrate the first time you make a tricky shot and dispatch an alien solider. You’ll delight in winning a mission and collecting alien technology. Through research you’ll incorporate the technology into your arsenal, with the ability to make and use better weapons, body armor, better fighter jets and other advancements. You can even develop the psionic skills so that you can turn the tables and turn the enemy’s soldiers against each other.
Your own soldiers become projects, not just pieces (even through there’s probably only six possible appearances for a soldier). Each one has a set of skills that increase through combat experience. You’re not just building a combat force, you’re cultivating a garden of skills. One recommended tactic is to replace the name assigned to each soldier with a series of codes that reflect their stats (yup, life is cheap). Chances are good that your developing soldier could be slaughtered on their next mission but there’s always the hope that they’ll survive and thrive. And, worse come to worse, each new soldier only costs $40,000 per year. A steal, as long as you don’t get any cowardly, weak willed, uncoordinated saps.
* * *
Now it’s 2023. X-COM is almost 30 years old. Does it still hold up? My answer is yes, but I don’t think the Millennial, Z or Alpha generations will care much for it. Too static, too limited. Their loss.
I’ve written that X-COM actually works well as a suspense and terror experience because of the shocking surprises that it throws at you. If you can become sufficiently engrossed in the game experience then you can still jump out of your seat in horror as the game tortures your soldiers, like having them walk into an ambush and die screaming from enemy plasma fire. But one of the worst surprises is when the aliens toss grenades or fire small guided missiles at you, the infamous Blaster Bombs, that can obliterate 20% of a map without breaking a sweat. You learn to keep a fair bit of distance between your troops unless you know the terrain is clear of aliens. Seeing a group of your soldiers die horribly when an unseen alien throws an exploding grenade at them is enough to raise a lump in your throat, especially if you’ve been spent hours increasing their skills with the hopes of making them the best of the best.
But, as I said, it's a tiny bit delightful to see all hell break loose too.
That’s the thing this archaic MS-DOS game can still do after all of these years: deliver emotional punches to the gut. If you can accept the outdated graphics, simplistic sounds and allow yourself to be immersed in the quest to save the world, you can still experience the roller coaster ride of emotions ranging from the thrill of victory to the sting of defeat.
To end on an ironic note: for a long time I’ve prided myself on finishing all difficulty levels on X-COM UFO Defense. Defeating Superhuman difficulty level? Achieved!
Then, much to my horror, I’ve recently discovered that there’s been a known bug in the game for decades. The game will always revert back to Beginner level of difficulty no matter how hard you try to make it. This means that I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to solving this game at its worst and in the end I was just playing tiddlywinks?
There’s only one course level to do, of course. Install the patches and play this damned game for real.
I load the game, set it to the penultimate difficulty level, and have at it.
The experience is grim, even horrifying. My soldiers are slaughtered as soon as they enter the battlescape. Snipers can take out two, even three of my soldiers per turn. My weapons are even less effective than they used to be.
I smile. At last, a real challenge.