Super Nerd Sundays Presents: X-Com and The End of the Age of Challenge!

I always find the games that I missed during my youth to be a little bit shameful. I didn’t have time to play System Shock 2 amidst the pangs of adolescence and the incredible story that was Half-Life. I didn’t have the opportunity to play Command and Conquer, one, two or Generals, because my parents would only buy me so many games and damnit Starcraft was great. The list goes on: Terra Nova, Ocarina of Time, Heroes of Might and Magic, Icewind Dale and a bevy of less random halcyon titles which came and went while I was busy being an awkward teenager.

But all of the excuses I used to have are fast vanishing as Steam increases our access to classic titles, and this is just a good thing. Steam negotiates a number of technical problems and lets us all see if these games really were as good as we thought, or if our perception of them was really tainted by rose colored glasses. For most players it’s just a chance to re-experience something like Monkey Island or the classic Dooms. This is your chance to see if those waterfalls in Unreal measure up to your adolescent mind, person who already had a chance to experience Doom ages ago.

But for some of us it’s a chance to examine these games in a vacuum for the first time, to see what all the fuss was about. And with Steam’s retardedly cheap holiday sales it was a great time to grab as many five dollar classic games as your tiny, withered heart could hold. That’s how I came to have X-Com sitting on my hard drive.

I didn’t learn about X-Com until Sluggy Freelance started running a series of in-engine comics a few years ago. Until then I’d associated the titles with the incredibly shitty X-Com: Interceptor, the first game in the series to come out when I was even mildly aware of games. There was no reason for me to go in on a generic space-sim at that point – I had X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, after all, and that was more than enough. Why would I want to tediously micromanage weapon hard-points when I could swoop in and fuck some bitches up in my A-Wing?

But a top down tactical game? That’s something I could get behind. I’d been enamored with the concept since Shining Force dropped on the Sega Genesis and cracked games as a medium wide open for me. When Final Fantasy went tactical I spent countless (because I’ve lost my memory card from the time) hours min-maxing my party and finding Cloud’s god damn motherfucking Materia Blade, easily the coolest and most colossal waste of time in the game. I was livid when Neverwinter Nights dropped its tactical Baldur’s Gate roots. If a game had an isometric view and character progression I would be on it like nothing else.

But technology has moved past the era of the tactics game, and indeed why should we keep making the same tired titles when we can try new and exciting things? So top down tactical games have fallen by the wayside. There’s no one to blame, really. Real Time Strategy games are awesome, and turn based tactical games are terrible to play with multiple people. My only frustration came from the fact that older tactics games tended to glitch out with newer operating systems, when you could find them at all. So when I sat down with X-Com last week, knowing just what I was in for, I was pretty excited.

But I hadn’t expected most of the elements of the game. The open world, the procedurally generated mission structure and the punishing difficulty curve were all staggering. I got the idea of firing aimed shots and staying in cover, but my first engagement still cost me a two-thirds of my soldiers. I thought I was just going to trade shots with aliens, but instead I was dropped into a losing battle with a vastly superior force. The only thing I had going for me was that I was so insignificant that the aliens had no need to attack me in my base, with my four assault rifles and bevy of horrified scientists.

X-Com did something few games manage to do: it challenged me. On its easiest difficulty setting. I was completely overwhelmed, John Kerry running for president. I had no idea what I was doing, how to accomplish objectives or manage resources. All I could do was save and reload, save and reload, save and reload until I finally learned that you can fire at different elevations or that labs can’t cooperate on research or that cannons are completely useless.

The challenge helped, though. It took all of two missions for me to form an emotional connection to my soldiers, to tool out my favorites with the best rifles and keep the rocket launcher in the back on whichever FNG had just come into the squad to replace recent casualties. I started to do everything I could to keep the little guys alive. I put an entire lab’s worth of staff to work researching med kits, powered armor and flight suits, anything for my squad’s safety. I didn’t want one of my little angels bleeding out.

And through this a greater narrative started to form, entirely divorced from the game. I started to imbue my characters with personality without thinking about it. There was the hardened sniper chick with nerves of steel who stayed at the back with a med kit and a steady shot for any scout in over his head, the hard nosed, fast moving leader who was always leading the charge in the best gear and the recon man with a plasma rifle and more twitch than a Crysalid. I should by all rights be embarrassed to have written that, but I just can’t be. X-Com made me shameless. It made me a kid again.

For all the childlike wonder, though, the systems governing the game were impressively complex. The interplay of various statistics, the tactical decisions it demanded and the punishing resource management that it forced on me was beyond anything that more recent RTSes were willing to levy at me. Even ostensibly hardcore games like RA:3 and Sins of a Solar Empire were nowhere near as complicated or finicky. They couldn’t afford to be, they needed to be tooled for multiplayer.

But without any of that wacky “need to interact with other humans” shit X-Com was free to construct an impressive elaborate set of systems which opened up a tremendous engine for emergent storytelling. What’s most impressive is how well it works with how little it has on hand. The cast of characters is limited, a tiny array of mostly interchangeable soldiers and faceless engineers and scientists who toil in the background and produce guns with more personality than half my military (previous members aside). The nations are all indistinguishable from one another – a base in the United States simply can’t be different from a base in Canada or Africa or Asia, the technology can’t support it. It’s already straining to deal with the world as a whole. Despite this the way the interactions between nations and your economy work, the way content is doled out, making every mission a potential first contact where you discover a new and potentially deadly threat and the way that these elements build towards an uncertain and unsettling future where literally anything can happen at any time is nothing short of amazing.

Contemporary games seem weak by comparison. Starcraft 2 is bitching about creating a campaign map, and how rendering each one is going to take them so much time that we won’t see hide or hair of their game for six months, at least. And then we’ll have to sit and wait for expansions to drop so that we can get the sort of content we’ve seen in ages past. X-Com has a dynamic campaign map running out of a DOSbox, and it manages to tell a story with as much drama and aplomb as Starcraft. More, maybe. The stakes in Starcraft were always low. Mengsk was always going to betray you and you could see it coming. Raynor is always going to live. Kerrigan’s tragedy, the game’s lone hook, comes up early and leaves players expecting something more. X-Com, by comparison, is constantly threatening to kill off my entire team. One Floater with a blaster launcher can take out five or six of my hard-won veteran squad members and put me right back at square one. I’d be lucky to get the armor back off their smoking bodies, and I wouldn’t have time to mourn. There are more troops to train, more vehicles to staff, more aliens to kill.

That’s the power of X-Com, the stakes that it forces the player to contend with, and in a way that’s what’s wrong with storytelling in games today. The stakes are pathetically low, the depth non-existent. It’s rare to see a design team with the stones to kill a main character, and rarer still to see them do it with anything but a noble sacrifice. And as Modern Warfare 2 proved even this sort of high-stakes storytelling can be poorly used, so much so that the impact it once had is completely annihilated by ceaseless or crass use of death as an “easy out.” By setting stories on rails and demanding that players “do it right” however many times games lose some of the cache they had in 1996, where fail states would do more than force you to play it all again, they’d potentially ruin your hours of progress or dramatically change the landscape of the game. Marketing departments weren’t calling the shots regarding game structure and difficulty, and as such developers could permit players to fail, work their failures into the game and punish them instead of picking them up and dusting them off, handing them a lolly to make sure they were still interested in sticking around and trying again.

I can’t think of a title quite so willing to allow players to fail, except perhaps Demon’s Souls, a game I have been unfortunately unable to play due to its console exclusivity. When we permit players to make mistakes nowadays we clearly label it with “optional objective” tags, and it’s kind of a shame. The tension of making difficult decisions, of being forced to deal with consequences, certainly wasn’t for every gamer, but it was a powerful and potent tool at the disposal of designers and developers, and we’re poorer as a community for the loss of this sort of gravitas.

So I recommend anyone with five bucks to lose purchase X-Com on Steam and re-live this sort of tension and challenge. Sure, it’s not perfect. The game is a little ugly, incredibly min-maxy, aggressively difficult and almost absurdly demanding. But it’s still well worth the time and the effort, and it stands as a reminder of what games used to be: punishing engines for the expression of our imaginations, places we could inhabit as much as systems we could master, and accomplishments under our belt when they were finally finished.