X-COM: Ғарыштан келген жаугершілік

UFO: Enemy Unknown (original European title), also known as X COM: UFO Defense in North America, is a 1994 science fiction strategy video game developed by Mythos Games and MicroProse. It was published by MicroProse for DOS and Amiga computers, the Amiga CD32 console, and the PlayStation. Originally planned by Julian Gollop as a sequel to Mythos Games' 1988 Laser Squad, the game mixes real time management simulation with turn based tactics. The player takes the role of commander of X COM – an international paramilitary and scientific organization secretly defending Earth from an alien invasion. Through the game, the player is tasked with issuing orders to individual X COM troops in a series of turn based tactical missions. At strategic scale, the player directs the research and development of new technologies, builds and expands X COM's bases, manages the organization's finances and personnel, and monitors and responds to UFO activity. Despite its troubled development, including having been almost cancelled twice, the game received strong reviews and was commercially successful, turning into a runaway sleeper hit and acquiring a cult following among strategy fans; several publications have listed X COM: UFO Defense as one of the best video games ever made, including IGN ranking it as the best PC game of all time in 2007. It was the first and best received entry in the X COM series and has directly inspired several similar games. An official remake of the game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was published in 2012.

The story of X COM, set in the near future at the time of the game's release, begins in the year 1998. The initial plot centers on increased reports of UFO sightings as tales of abductions and rumors of attacks by mysterious aliens become widespread. The nations of the world come to perceive this as a threat and attempt to form their own forces – such as Japan's Kiryu Kai force – to deal with the crisis, but these efforts are unsuccessful. On December 11, 1998, representatives from some of the most powerful nations in the world secretly meet in Geneva to discuss the issue. From this meeting is born the clandestine defense and research organization Extraterrestrial Combat (X COM), over which the player assumes control at the start of the game. In the beginning, the player will only have access to conventional weapons, but as the game progresses, the player learns more about the enemy, their species, mutated creations, and technology. It is ultimately revealed that the "leaders" behind the alien invasion are a race known as Ethereals which possess powerful mind control abilities and enslave other races of aliens to perform their bidding and that their main base in the Solar System is located in Cydonia region of Mars. The player must then prepare the final assault team, attack Cydonia and destroy the mastermind behind the alien invasion, the biocomputer Alien Brain. The game may end in several ways. If the player's performance is poor or worse for two consecutive months, the player runs a deep deficit for two consecutive months, all the player's bases are captured, or the player mounts an assault on the aliens' Mars base and loses, the game ends in defeat (in the PC version, the funding nations sign pacts with the aliens promising peace, but the aliens instead destroy every city and poison the water and air to destroy any resistance, the remaining survivors are put in slave camps to help reverse terraform Earth for future alien colonization; in the PlayStation version, the council of funding nations makes a futile attempt to negotiate with the aliens, who violently murder the negotiator). If, however, the player is victorious in the final attack, the game ends in mankind's victory.

The game takes place within two distinct views, called the Geoscape and the Battlescape. As described by GameSpy, "in effect, X COM melds an SSI Gold Box RPG with a highly detailed 4X game like Master of Orion, making it in some ways two entirely different games."

The game begins on January 1, 1999, with the player choosing a location for their first base on the Geoscape screen: a global view representation of Earth as seen from space (displaying X COM bases and aircraft, detected UFOs, alien bases, and sites of alien activity). The player can view the X COM bases and make changes to them, equip fighter aircraft, order supplies and personnel (soldiers, scientists and engineers), direct research efforts, schedule manufacturing of advanced equipment, sell alien artifacts on black market to raise money, and deploy X COM aircraft to either patrol designated locations, intercept UFOs, or send X COM ground troops on missions using transport aircraft. Instead, it is presented in a symbolic form using isometric view 2D bitmap graphics. It also features a highly destructible environment where almost all game objects and the landscape itself can be damaged or destroyed by gunfire and especially by explosions. The Battlescape's turn based system uses action points, known in the game as Time Units (TUs), that are distributed between individual soldiers according to their statistics (including the total weight of carried equipment relative to their strength, and the top and current levels of stamina). Each turn, their TUs can be spent for movement and a variety of actions (through an icon based GUI), such as firing weapons, managing their equipment including ammunition (items carried in hands, pockets, belt, and backpack), picking up or throwing objects (limited in this to friendly or enemy equipment or bodies), kneeling down, using items, reloading weapons, and priming explosives. Shooting options include a snap shot, an aimed shot, and possibly a burst if a given weapon has an autofire mode. Some weapons can also be loaded with non standard types of ammunition (such as high explosive rounds or incendiary rockets) and some are non lethal for capturing aliens alive. A major feature called Opportunity Fire enables combatants to automatically shoot at a spotted hostile during the enemy turn if enough of their TUs have been reserved and left unspent. "but with much neater graphics using an isometric style very similar to Populous." The initial 1991 demo presented a relatively simple, two player tactical game then known as Laser Squad 2 (or Laser Squad II), which ran on the Atari ST.
Due to bad experiences with Blade Software in selling their previous game, Lords of Chaos, the Gollop brothers (Julian and Nick) approached three other video game publishers, British Krisalis Software and Domark and the international MicroProse, eventually brokering a deal with MicroProse. Julian Gollop was especially happy about it because he greatly respected MicroProse and believed it was probably the best video game company in the world at the time. He changed the setting to modern day Earth and expanded the strategy elements, among them the ability to capture and reproduce alien technology. A book by Bob Lazar, where he describes his supposed work with recovered UFOs at Area 51, inspired the concept to reverse engineer captured alien technology. visuals. Julian Gollop credited Reitze, who also designed the alien races, composed the original soundtrack of the PC version while Andrew Parton handled the sound effects. Besides Moreland, there were other MicroProse employees not acknowledged in the game's credits despite having been major contributors to its development, such as assisting designers Mike Brunton and (especially) Steve Hand. A public demo of the game was released under the North American version's working title X COM: Terran Defense Force. Despite numerous changes from the first demo, the tactical part of the game remains true to the turn based layout of Laser Squad and the Gollop brothers' earlier Rebelstar series. In the course of its development, the game was nearly canceled twice: in the first instance due to the company's financial difficulties, and the second time under the pressure from the American combat flight simulator company Spectrum HoloByte after it had acquired Bill Stealey’s shares in MicroProse in 1993. Julian Gollop said the MicroProse quality assurance team (testers Andrew Lucket, Phil McDonnel and Jason Thompson) helped save the game from its first would be cancellation; their enthusiastic feedback also helped to polish the game. However, Moreland held a meeting with other MicroProse UK bosses Adrian Parr and Paul Hibbard, where they decided to ignore it and would simply not inform the Gollop brothers and others involved in the project about any of that. Thus, the development team continued their work without any knowledge of the parent company's executives.). In Japan, the game was renamed by Culture Brain as X COM Michi Naru Shinryakusha (X COM 未知なる侵略者) and released with a cover using a different art style and better reflecting the actual game content. The 1995 PlayStation port, released in Europe as X COM: Enemy Unknown, has retained most of the original PC graphics due to time restraints (adding only some textured 3D models as illustrations for the UFOpaedia) but features much higher quality music than the 8 bit MIDI music of the PC version, replacing it 55 minutes of CD quality tracks and 8 minutes of 16 bit tracks. The new soundtrack was composed by Allister Brimble, who later also created the music for the first sequel, X COM: Terror from the Deep. The game is compatible with the (highly recommended X COM (Collector's Edition) by MicroProse in 1998, X COM Collection by Hasbro Interactive in 1999, X COM: Complete Pack by 2K Games in 2008 and 2K Huge Games Pack in 2009, as well as in the "Classic Games Collection" CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer. In X COM: Complete Pack (also known as X COM Collection), all five X COM games were released for paid download on Steam with added Windows XP and Windows Vista support.

Diane Duane's 1995 X COM: UFO Defense – A Novel tells the story of Jonelle Barrett, commander of X COM's newly established Swiss base. According to Rock, Paper, Shotgun's negative review of Duane's novel, it is hampered by a poor understanding of the game, a lack of focus, emotional resonance and tension, and an unstructured plot. Another novelization of the game, Враг неизвестен ("Enemy Unknown") written by Vladimir Vasilyev, was published in Russia in 1997. The book tells the story of one of the original eight X COM troops from beginning of the conflict to the final raid on Cydonia.

Fan made patches fix a notorious bug which results in the game always resetting to the easiest difficulty level ("Beginner") after completing the first Battlescape mission, no matter what difficulty level has been selected. This glitch was not noticed by MicroProse and was not fixed in the official patches, resulting in the very high difficulty of the sequel fixes it as well as addressing interface problems and better balancing the game;

OpenXcom is an open source reimplementation of that game to fix all the known bugs and limits, improve the AI and user interface, localize in more languages, and to provide cross platform builds, e. g. for Linux and Android. The second focus of OpenXcom is to enable customizing, modding and expansions, such as the total conversion X Piratez.

The game was released to very positive reviews and commercial success, selling more than 600,000 units (a large number at the time) on the PC DOS platform, not counting the later ports—for the Amiga platforms and the PlayStation—and re releases. Half of the game's net sales were in the United States, a rarity for a European title at the time. Gollop has attributed the game's North American success to its title (X COM), as the television series The X Files had premiered a year earlier. Together with its sequel, X COM: Terror from the Deep, its sales had passed 1 million copies by March 1997. The game earned the Gollop brothers just over £1 million in royalties. Computer Gaming World rated the PC version of X COM five stars out of five. Describing it as "one of those rare and dangerous games capable of drilling into your brain, putting a vice grip on your imagination, and only releasing you when it has had enough," the magazine praised its detailed and varied combat system and lengthy gameplay, concluding "Resistance is futile". GameSpot review said, "put simply, X COM is a bona fide modern classic, standing proudly alongside Civilization and Populous as a benchmark in the evolution of strategy gaming." A common point of criticism for the floppy disk version was the need to frequently swap the disks in the Amiga systems not equipped with a hard disk drive, while the CD ROM based CD32 version does not allow the users to save the progress of any other game without wiping out the save game of UFO. Nevertheless, a review in Amiga Action called it "easily the most original and innovative game in the history of the Amiga", and a review in CU Amiga of the 1997 budget range re release called it the "game everyone loves". Electronic Gaming Monthly stated of the PlayStation version that "any person who likes strategy games will fall in love with this title if you could afford to buy one game for the PS over the next year, X COM would be it. It has it all and then some!" GamePro disagreed: "You have to be a major sim freak to enjoy X COM. It's an interesting and complex game about planet colonizing, but the extensive manuals and one dimensional music really bore you to alien tears after a while." Computer Gaming World gave X COM its Game of the Year award. PC Gamer US presented UFO Defense with its 1994 Best Strategy Game award. The editors wrote, "X COMs classic mix of action and strategy will have you hooked for hours, and made this one of the finest games of the year."

Edge called X COM "the title that first brought turn based wargaming to the masses." It has been inducted into several halls of fame, including by Computer Gaming World in 2005, by GameSpot in 2003 (featured among The Greatest Games of All Time as "one of the defining games of the turn based strategy genre"), and by IGN in 2007 ("if this game were a woman, we'd marry it"). The first X COM has often appeared in top video game lists by various publications. Computer Gaming World ranked it as the 22nd (1996) and third (2001) best computer game of all time; the magazine's readers also voted it for tenth place in 2001. It was also ranked as the 48th game of all time by GamesMaster in 1996, as the 35th best video game of all time by GameSpy in 2001 ("stellar game design can withstand the test of time"), as the second best video game since 1992 by Finnish magazine Pelit in 2007, and as the 78th best video game "to play today" by Edge in 2009. IGN named it as the number one top PC game of all time in 2000 while calling it "the finest PC game we have ever played", and 2007 ("there's still no PC game that can compete with the mighty X COM"), as well as ranking it as the second top "modern PC game" in 2009. IGN also included it on several lists of the best video games of all time on all platforms, including it at eighth place in 2003 ("a game that will live on in the annals of computer gaming history"), at 12th place in 2005 ("for us 1994 will always be remembered as the year of X COM"), and at 21st place in 2007 ("one of the most memorable and perfectly executed strategy games ever seen"). PC Gamer ranked it as the seventh (1997), eighth (1998), third (2001), eighth (2005), tenth (in both 2007 and 2008, as a "truly groundbreaking game" that "still plays fresher than almost anything else that begs passage through these pages"), 11th (2010, the editors adding that everyone who would not vote for this game is "dead" to them) and 12th (2011, describing it as a "brilliant game whose individual elements have been copied many times but whose charm has never been duplicated") best PC game of all time; it was also voted at 15th place by the magazine's readers in 2000. Polish web portal Wirtualna Polska listed it the 13th best Amiga game, as well as the third most addictive game "that stole our childhood"; it was also retrospectively ranked as the eighth best Amiga game by the Polish edition of CHIP. Next Generation listed X COM as the 26th top console game of all time in 1996 ("breathed new live into turn based strategy genre"), as well as the 37th in 1999 ("revamp[ed] the turn based subgenre by strengthening the resource management elements and adding highly intuitive interface"). In 2012, while awaiting the remake, The Escapist ran a feature article about "why X COM is the greatest game ever," while game designer Ken Levine named it as one of his all time personal favorites. In 2015, Rock, Paper, Shotgun ranked it as the sixth best strategy game ever made ("in the thick of a terror mission, with [C]rysal[l]ids seeming to pour out of the walls, or in those last hours when you finally seem capable of taking the fight to the aliens, there's nothing else quite like X COM"). One reason for the game's success is the strong sense of atmosphere it evokes. The game's Xenomorph inspired In 2012, including it among the most essential game of all time, 1UP. com commented that "with its unrivaled balance of tactics and tension, [X COM] remains a masterpiece."

The success of the game resulted in several sequels and spin off games, as well as many unofficial remake and spiritual successor titles, both fan made and commercial, such as UFO: Alien Invasion and UFO: Extraterrestrials. Julian Gollop himself designed the third game in the X COM series, 1997's X COM: Apocalypse, which was also developed together by Mythos Games and MicroProse. The game also received an unofficial sequel in the 1997 expansion set Civ II: Fantastic Worlds for MicroProse's Civilization II, in a scenario set on the Phobos moon of Mars. Mythos Games' and Julian Gollop's own original spiritual successor project, The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, was cancelled in 2001 and later partially turned into UFO: Aftermath by another developer. Gollop's new X COM spiritual successor project, Phoenix Point, was released by Snapshot Games in 2019. An official remake, titled XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was developed by Firaxis Games, led by MicroProse's co founder Sid Meier. The game's prototype was actually a modernization of the original, with all the classic gameplay features, but then gradually evolved into a completely "reimagined" version, having abandoned the Time Units system for a simpler and more cinematic gameplay centered around class abilities and use of cover. The game was released by 2K Games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in October 2012, winning multiple Game of the Year awards. A retrospective article in Eurogamer compared both games with "a sort of objectivity ( ) that hasn't been remotely possible over the last two decades of worshipping [X COM] at its VGA shrine," seeing the original as "a game that can and will co exist with rather than be supplanted by its remake. X COM and XCOM are completely different games, both ingenious and both flawed in their own ways." In a positive review of the remake, GameSpy nevertheless left "the title of Best Game Ever with the original." Julian Gollop himself commented that "Firaxis did a terrific job with the new XCOM," although he "would have done things differently for sure. ( ) I tried many times for many years to get a remake underway, but Firaxis finally did it. Also, there is a promising and more faithful remake called Xenonauts." The 2012 XCOM, too, was followed by its own sequel and spin off games. The game also had a big influence on the development team of the role playing video game Fallout. Project director Tim Cain said they "all loved X COM" and that the original version of Fallout (known as Vault 13, before the game was redesigned after they lost the GURPS license) had a very similar combat system.