I’d missed the news originally, but the X-Com series of games have been added to Steam by the new owners of the franchise, 2K Games. As an added bargain, last weekend they were on sale making them only £2.99 for the complete set of UFO, Terror from the Deep, Apocalypse, Interceptor and Enforcer.
For those that have never played these games, its a classic strategy series that sees you running the organisation (X-Com) and responsible for defending Earth from the invading alien hoardes. This management takes place across two main game-modes. The first, the Geoscape, is a management window, where you recruit troops, buy equipment, research alien technologies, build new bases, and launch interception missions against the UFOs.
The second game mode is when you launch a ground assault against alien bases, and grounded UFOs. Here the game switches to an isometric squad-based strategy game, typically turn-based, where you take direct control of your troops and clear the area of invading aliens, or attempt to capture them.
Now I already owned most of these, but Apocalypse has been pretty stubborn about running on anything after Windows 2000. So for £2.99 I figured it was more than worth it to have XP-friendly versions of these games.
Having now installed UFO and Apocalypse, I was amused to see that they’re running ontop of a pre-setup version of DOSBox. I hadn’t expected that, but its nice to see it being used to make these older games available to the mass-market once again, and it strikes me that there’s no reason this couldn’t also be done with other old games.
I must admit, its great fun playing Apocalypse again after all these years. I know a lot of people don’t rate it as highly as the earlier games, but for me I always found it fun. I’ve always quite enjoyed the (new to this game) realtime combat when it gets particularly mental and the troops start laying waste to whatever building they’re in.
However I’m surprised by UFO and Terror From the Deep running ontop of DOSBox. This is because I also bought the X-Com Collector’s Edition pack a (good) few years back. The interesting thing about this release (which contained the first four games, and Email X-Com), was that they’d ported UFO and Terror to DirectX, so they run natively on Windows XP with no problems whatsoever. I’d have thought these versions would’ve been the better ones for 2K Games to use, especially since I noticed that the Steam version of UFO isn’t entirely happy with my widescreen monitor, and the top and bottom of the window disappears off-screen, a problem that doesn’t exist on the DirectX port.
However, if you can’t get ahold of the Collector’s Edition (and in complete fairness, these games aren’t easy to buy any more), its still great to have the option to buy them on Steam, and for the price they’re an absolute bargain (£2.99 each I believe) as these are the kinds of game that will suck you in, and before you know it, you’ve just completed a 4 hour stretch.
Here’s hoping they sell well, and 2K Games decide to expand their Steam catalogue to include other DOS-based games.
