The alternative name of this game was always murmured in the gaming circles, but even so, less so than Pool of Radiance. Despite the latter being a generation (or three) more outdated. Once upon a day i looked at one of my “70 old games collection” CDs and noticed UFO being there. I decided to try it out and it did work.
The first time i played the game it was already ancient. By that date i’ve already finished Silent Storm and Jagged Alliance 2 (ironically, i’ve bought both in the same day). Back in the day, before the internet, it was really easy to get your drivers corrupted and be stuck with the GPU running in the default mode, 16 or 256 colours. So maybe it was another time when i was sitting with a PC but without the drivers. And well, i was stuck with an S3 or a SiS GPU, to begin with, which were damn pathetic.
Back then i really had a lot of patience for games. Because somehow i experimentally learned this whole GUI and realised that the game is way more complex and deep than ОSS and JA2. I played it for some time and showed it to my then-dawg. Until i decided to try ArtMoney on it. I gave myself infinite TUs and energy and was clearing out encounters in one turn and then flying away. Without realising that ending my turn would finish the encounter and give me all the resources. When i did realise that, i progressed through the game and shot the alien brain in the nads.
Posted: 12 May, 2012 @ 6:19pm | 15.0 hrs last two weeks / 53.5 hrs on record (33.2 hrs at review time)
So-o-o-o-o… It seems somewhen in 2012 i decided to actually play properly and finish the game with no cheats. This save is older than the game was, when i first tried it. I had to learn the GUI basically from scratch, but it was a very fun and deep game. I was enjoying it immensely.
Until i’ve reached the PSI stage of the progression and smashed into a monolith wall at full speed. My full end-game gear team was constantly under the influence, either panicking or being controlled and shooting my own doods. I didn’t expect this because i never let the enemies act when i was cheating in my childhood. I read up on that, and people plain say that every soldier has hidden stats, which cannot be improved or discovered until it’s too late. Basically you may as well create a new team from scratch.
That is after…
- Your gimped team somehow beats puppet masters;
- Takes some alive.
- Your researchers interrogate those for a month.
- You build a psionic lab in 24 more days;
- Hire a hundred of candidates;
- Wait till the start of the next month;
- Test 10 of them for an entire month. Go to 6.
- And hope that out of them all at least some will be useful, with more than 85 IQ.
…all the while letting many of the saucers attack the population, for months, resulting in a dramatic decrease of your funding.
This sounds like the generic “low moment” of traditional anglo-saxon “three act” storytelling, but games are not movies, nor books, and the rest of the world is not yankeestan. “Low moments” suck, and those pointless levels in computer games, where your inventory gets taken away, are a cargo cult.
This difficulty overhang is not a “low moment” for your crew, this is basically starting the game anew on ultra-nightmare, with rookies against end-game enemies and with dwindling funds. Being splattered on that difficulty cliff killed all my enthusiasm for the game for years. I still was not losing all the hope, sometimes launching the game, wasting a whole day of save-loads to beat just one tactical battle and lose all joy of life again. Being frustrated every time i was reading up on advices. And finally, amidst the “git gud” senile boomers and kids whining about it being cowmanure together with me, i saw an actual proper ⚠️advice to drop the gun at the end of the turn and to pick it up at the beginning of the next one.⚠️
Now with that knowledge i did make some progress in the earliest 20s. I got all my teams tested, sent the weaklings to USA base and assembled the more or less capable guys in europe. And left the game until i’ll have a mood.
Which i somehow got into, this month. And well, here we are.
— / • / —
The current Steam release is another puppydoodoo DosBox setup. The default 2K config runs this 1994 game in 16:10 widescreen, and with a pixel-blur upscaler.
On my ~49″ 16//9 screen i’ve played some hours in widescreen, after disabling the filtering, of course. But then i had enough of the wideguys and forced aspect correction. DosBox is way far from perfect, especially with it lacking any GUI for less advanced users. Frankly, i don’t even remember how i made it to run the game with proper pillarboxing. But now i’m on a 4//3 screen and i’ve used these settings:
fullresolution=desktop (lucky i’m on 1600×1200?)
aspect=true
scaler=normal3x (the hell they still don’t have 6x or more)
cycles=26800
Developers back then didn’t give a single solitary flying fuck, did they? This 1994 game made for 4//3 CRT screens had 3D geoscape rendered at DOS native 16//10 with no aspect correction. It really pissed me off in the 00s, and still does to this day. No one knew what they were doing, juggling at least two signal formats — NTSC and PAL, sometimes using early widescreen CRTs at work, creating sprites in diverse software on diverse architectures and operating systems, each handling aspect correction in different ways. Some programs displayed an aspect-corrected image, but recorded pixel-perfect files, some displayed a pixel-perfect image but recorded aspect-corrected files, some software did whatever it wanted. And then there were Mac people. Or all those non-IBM-compatible-using artists creating assets.
Most of the circles are oval. At least half of the assets are distorted no matter which aspect you chose. Tanks’ weapons sprites are always stretched. None of the things are unified to run either corrected or wide. When i’ve tried to play in widescreen, the doods were so wide they were wider than broadway. Oh look, he’s so broad he’s broader than broadway, he’s so broad another incompetent publishing company decided to stretch a 4//3 video to 16//9. The wide battlescape sucks way more than the oval geoscape. And, well, oval geoscape is the authors’ original vision. Point fingers at it and laugh.
The game has a total mishmash hodgepodge porridge art-style. It opens with a comics-styled intro, has doods with Guile haircuts and X-men designs, and then there are fully realistic art assets, or cartoony but thorough graphic autopsies.
The GUI is atrocious. The game came out the same year as Arena, System Shock, Warcraft, and Jagged Alliance. So the devs thought this GUI style is good. But it was not good even back then. And the UFO GUI takes the cake. Especially compared to Warcraft and Jagged Alliance. JA is in roughly the same genre, yet it has an easy to understand GUI, with hints, better FoV, and voice acting. Warcraft has a perfectly clear interface. With voice acting its presentation is two generations ahead of UFO. It’s the controls which are more dated. There’s no edge scrolling and move controls are done through a menu. Which is even worse for a real-time game. 
So we have left and right hands. Okay, but when you use two handed weapons the game gives no feedback on that. If you read the half-filled with fanfiction and bad advice UFOpaedia site (they want you to run a 1994 4//3 game in widescreen) it claims that the formula for accuracy takes into account if the gun is one handed or two handed, and if you put something into the other hand. To shoot you press your gun and get a giant list of available actions. Looks terrible, but at least the font is big and easy to read, and that action is more intuitive than Jagged Alliance 2. Now, how do you reload? No, you can’t press the gun and see the option to reload replacing the options to shoot. You manually open the fullscreen inventory tab and put ammo into the gun. If you want to access your pockets you have to do the same. Unloading is annoying.
Then there’s the picture of a dude going up and down. Okay, if it doesn’t make them go prone it means they literally can go up and down.
Now there’s a picture of a ladder up and down. But going up the stairs is done with a cursor? And using lifts is done by the first two buttons? Well, what this actually does is that it moves your camera’s floor up and floor down.
But wait, there’s that button on the right clearly depicting a storey and its number. Which is the most useless button in the game. It shows the top ceiling. Why not use this crystal clear universal pictogram for the storey up/down?
Next we have the minimap button, which looks like blueprints at best. But at least it’s easy to understand if you press it. It isn’t that useful, because the minimap still can’t fit the entire battlescape on its screen. Taking the knee is an understandable pictogram, but the game never tells you that it increases your accuracy.
A dude standing. Looks like character stats, but it’s the inventory. Fair enough. To see the stats sheet you have to click the shoulder board.
Move the grave to all four corners of the earth is centring the camera on the selected unit.
The “select next” buttons are plausibly understandable.
So i see the “cancel” button, which probably de-selects the current unit, or cancels the aim mode. But how do you end the turn? The obviously “cancel” button is actually not-obviously the “end your turn button”.
Question mark. Probably tutorial? In-game ufopaedia? Help? So tell me, help, how do you save the game or change the settings, like music volume? By pressing question mark. Why not a gear? Or just [Esc]? Okay, so how do you load the save you just made? You don’t. Exit the game and restart it from the main menu. Ok, so how do you exit the game? You can’t exit the game through the options menu. You have to flee to geoscape to get access to the main menu. I finished the game only recently, but when i launched the game to take that screenshot i already got confused and lost.
Flippin’ ‘eck!
The tactical actions you can perform in the game are all understandable and clear. But to reach that clearance you have to be born in this GUI, molded by it. And well, there are no rebindable hotkeys, or even their list. It all is in the manual. Which no one ever saw or had. Even people in the western countries with the original big box releases were losing them and throwing them away, or renting games without boxes. Steam has utterly ruined its interface. Only right now i’ve discovered that it even has the manual, just because i tried to prove that it doesn’t, before committing that thought to e-paper. And the manual is scatter-brain and poorly arranged anyway. I skimmed through it and there are no hotkeys. But at very least it shows screenshots proving that this game has to be run aspect-corrected.
This being a “spiritual successor” (because it started as a sequel) to Laser Squad, Mythos Games wanted to pretend their new game has better graphics the SEGA MD2 way — bigger prettier sprites and lower FoV. And of course there are no resolution or zoom options in most of the games from the 90s. The FoV is so bad, that every missed shot goes through 3-4 screens without smooth scrolling.
When i was playing it on a 5//4 17″ screen back in the 00s it was pretty bad, but in the 20s on a 49″ WS it’s outright claustrophobic. Going full circle, i now finished it on a 4//3 21″ screen. But at least it’s not that SXGA 17″ tube that took up like a half of my room.
So while i described how it looked and felt generations more dated even compared to the games from the same year, gameplay-wise none of them could compete. I think in some aspects it’s even deeper than JA2.
You have the battlescape with a fully 3D (gameplay-wise) environment, that you can navigate with jetpacks. And if you know the controls it’s easy to control your actions precisely. The environment is destructible and reacts to your actions. Your human soldiers underperform in low visibility, but you can throw flares. PSI allows you to control enemy units. You can and must take prisoners. There’re diverse types of missions, like terror. And there are diverse types of enemies. The maps are procedurally generated and do not repeat.
You have the geoscape with minor strategic and strong economic management.
You have workshops sweating away to produce alien or cutting edge technologies to sell them to third-world dictatorships for big bucks. And warehouses filled with alien stuff and corpses for sale.
You intercept, you clean-up, you research, you manufacture, you are publicly funded and publicly responsible, you do business on the side. Nothing ever came even close to this game.
UFO: Alien Invasion looks like it’s something. But it’s a janky non-commercial abandoned passion project. And passion is a thing that always gets lost.
UFO: Extraterrestrials should’ve just had better GUI, controls and graphics than UFO. But instead the game from 2007 has worse graphics, controls and GUI than the DOS game.
UFO reboots are unpopular real-time affairs.
Xenonauts is a small, very cut-down clone, missing many of the aspects of the original, where only the presentation, GUI and controls are improved.
XSOM is an insufferable appstore trash, with gameplay ten years more outdated than here, and controls and camera designed for drunk housewives swiping tablets while swiping on tablets. The camera fights you every second.
Phoenix Project is a refreshingly different game, but it’s filled with terrible decisions to the brim.
Even the story and the writing are pretty good. I always felt that it was inspired by The Puppet Masters, even the last jet is called Avenger, same as in the book.
Besides the hidden PSI-strength, and PSI school being open only on the 1st day of a month, mechanics-wise there are very few things i can criticize.
First of all, healing. In-field healing is obtuse and convoluted. At-base healing takes an unrealistically short amount of time, which by the measures of this game’s pacing is actually extremely long. The late game is so filled with saucers, that while i was waiting a week for my dude to heal and to finally go visit the final boss, i’ve skipped about 30-40 crash sites. And skipping any means less funding, so they are basically mandatory, with no quick-battle button of any kind.
I think there has to be a way to have a clean-up crew, which gives like only a half of the resources. A shady figure proposes mid-game to clean up small and medium-sized crash-sites with no mind control aliens, in exchange for their operations being deemed as a part of the X-Com initiative, but with no public oversight. That way it’s better than the money-sink option from Xenonauts, and running out of elerium, which is the fuel used for every dogfight. Cleaning up Crash Site-647 with two half-dead mutons hiding on the third story of a barn at night is just not as exciting as it was with Crash Site-1 to 50.
Heavy plasma makes everything kinda useless and it’s in abundance. The starting set of weapons on the other hand is uselessly diverse. All guns need a full rebalance, with each type being good at different things, like range, damage and accuracy. Either each tier being the best at something, or have the starting set of weapons be present at each tier with different roles. There are no downsides to heavy plasma. But at least there’s a point to using laser during the mid-game. Aliens don’t use heavy plasma for some time. Meanwhile in Terror all the weapons are absolutely useless garbage compared to the sonic cannons, which appear starting with the first mission, and can be rushed. Or more like must be rushed at all costs. No other weapon in the game has any use at all, most early-game enemies are already almost immune to them. The only upgrade over heavy plasma is mind control, when you can pull out cattle prods.
The game has the 31st of february.
UFO: Enemy Unknown offers exemplary tactical and economical depth. But unlike the most of the 90s games the GUI, engine, and the controls are truly a serious challenge. The layers between the player and the gameplay here are so obtuse, that i can’t just say to everyone, “go try it yourself”. Yet, no similar game comes even close to it. The only alternative i can mention is openXcom which adds only a few of QoL options.
But i didn’t finish openXcom, so i can’t guarantee it is working properly, i have only a limited number of tens of hours in it. This is a finished stable release which i’ve finished, that is a pet tinker project in alpha, that doesn’t even have a stable release. One day it can be entirely different from the next day. But if i to believe the ads it is feature complete and working. It’s a free client, easy to install. But it still requires an ownership of the original game. At the very least it adds some hotkeys, quicksaves, a proper menu, increased resolution (and therefore FoV) for battlescape.
But openXcom comes without the aspect correction options, because the teenage dunces who developed it are unaware that back then DOS was running at 320×200, but people were using 1024×768 or even 1280×1024 screens, while Windows run everything in exclusive fullscreen (that’s why many 90s games don’t even have resolution options, why bother if you can be lazy). The openXcom kids could literally open the manual. Yes, geoscape bothers the hell out of metoo, whoever rendered it was a lazy arse. But if openXcom kids are so smart that they allowed for a bigger resolution in battlescape (which was a separate sub-program in some releases), why won’t they make geoscape run without aspect correction, and battlescape with? Why not allow for better resolutions? Why not fix all the stretched sprites? If they can’t program it to render properly, they can use overscan to hide the -boxing options. Or not, pillarboxing have never killed anyone. I can stretch the game to my 4//3 monitor, but i don’t know how openXcom will behave on a 16//9 screen. And i sure will never recommend anyone to use something which intentionally runs at a wrong aspect ratio.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 