I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I played the crap out of the original UFO back in the day. And I do mean the original UFO, even though I live in the part of the world where it was released as X-COM. When I worked at Leading Edge Products in 1994, another member of the hardware support team had gotten his hands on a bootleg of the UK version of the game somewhere, months before the US version came out. (It might even have been a UK prerelease copy.) This was before the Web was really a thing for people outside of CERN, so I have no idea where he got it. Gopher, probably. Or someone in England mailed him diskettes.

Either way, and despite the fact that we had no documentation for its, let's face it, insanely complicated gameplay, UFO became the game of choice for whiling away the downtime at Leading Edge. Particularly among those of us who were lucky enough to be assigned to the dealer support line (as dealers called for support much less often than end users, and when they did call it was usually just because they needed a part number lookup). Because it was turn-based, it could be left sitting idle for the duration of a support call without ruining the game, unlike real-time games. There was a group of us who got quite good at it.

So, because I can't play either of the modern XCOM games on my aging laptop, I figured I'd give OpenXcom a shot, since it allows things like the use of modern display aspect ratios, windowed mode, and so on. I was anxious to see whether the various modifications and gameplay tweaks touted by the program's creators would affect that classic UFO experience.

Within about a half-hour, I had gotten my whole squad killed on the first UFO crash site mission, on the easiest difficulty setting, after which the game crashed to desktop.

So yeah! It's the authentic UFO experience, all right. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.