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I just love this game.  Aliens start landing in fields and abducting cattle, then start landing on cities killing lots of people because they want to take over the Earth.  XCom's job is to stop them, nick their technology and kick their butts.

Lots of nice management aspects against the research stuff but actually stop the alien incursions aspect.  It's nice in that if countries are badly defended they'll slash their funding to XCom or even sign a pact with the aliens and your job gets even harder.  Do well and your funding is increased.  You need increased funding in order to cover all the countries because this would take about 8 bases.  So the start of the game is a prioritisation exercise. 

Despite clunky graphics (which, when you get "personal armour" invented, make your troops look like they're mincing very badly as they walk across the landscape), It's a nice, nice game.  In my opinion.  --Jumlian

It's TurnBasedStrategy main game, with RealTime? ResourceManagement? bits between the levels.  A classic.  --Vitenka
And, as I am reminded on a replay (I've got the disk, but didn't have the 'make it work again' patch) - it's very very hard at the beginning.  Even on the easiest difficulty settings.  I'd also add that even with the patch, the game sometimes bombs out when starting a combat - so save before your crew arrives on the scene.  --Vitenka
Yes, it is hard at the start, isn't it?  My base got attacked on the 19th of January in one game.  At Beginner level.  I lost.  The starting base is pretty indefensible structurally; you get attacked from all sides.  With blaster launchers :-(.  And yes, it does crash on mission start sometimes.  So save frequently. --Jumlian

On my computer, even with C&C - Generals running in the background to try and slowdown, it's still so fast as to be 90% unplayable. You can't see where the aliens' shots are coming from, or set the Geoscape time step to more than 5 seconds without going past about a month a second. --Requiem

You do get that, but there is a speed setting hidden in the options screen when you're in a landed mission.  I used to set it to the slowest, and although shots did whicker across screen at blinding speed you could still see stuff.  Just.  The animation of moving aliens is done at the right speed, mind you.  This was all on a PII though, I hate to think how much faster it'll be on an Athy XP 2GHz+....  --Jumlian

Er, yeah, on an Athy XP shots do move too fast to see, (or even attempt to display unless it was subliminally fast), although I wasn't using any slowdown.  But hey, if anyone in the XCom team can see the alien that fired you do get to see them stomping around afterwards, which helps.  More annoying is the scrolling going waaaaay too fast, but there's an option for only allowing scroll when the mouse button's pressed which may make this less of a reflex-testing nightmare.  I'll have to try it.  No problem with the geoscape speed although this was XComTerrorFromTheDeep I was playing last night, not XComEnemyUnknown.  --Jumlian

Update (WikiNow June2006).  There is a version of this classic (the "gold edition") that runs fine on XP with no need for slowdown or anything and none of the above problems - in the combat mode anyway.  Setting shot speed to slowest causes them to dawdle across the screen for many seconds, no other programs running, and although the geoscape operates at a fair rate - you'll never need to set it faster than 30 mins - it is pretty playable.  Also, for the first time in ages it has sound, the old version disagreeing fundamentally with 32 bit sound cards.  Two minor bugs - occasional colour glitching to a random palette (twice), although I get this with StarCraft too, so it may be a hardware issue.  Save, quit and restart to recover.  Have also had one random crash when it couldn't find a sound file.  Downloadable free from FilePlanet? if you have a subscription, as an 8MB zip file.  There goes my weekend. --Jumlian
[FilePlanet download] [Under-dogs download]



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