There is much praising to be done, for UFO: Enemy Unknown is available on Steam for $5 (or with the rest of the XCom games for $15, with 10% off for the first week which slightly offsets the VAT). Much passing of ammunition is also needed, for some of those aliens are tough buggers.

UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-COM: UFO Defense, if you want to be all American about it) is just fantastic. Fifteen years later it’s still got it; finishing Audiosurf last night after “just one song” (and then another, and then…), the Steam news box popped up with the aforementioned offer, and even though I’ve got four of the five games somewhere (the three “proper” games, and I picked up Interceptor for about 99p in a bargain bin somewhere, played it about twice, never did bother with Enforcer), at that price it seemed rude not to grab ’em. I guess it’s a sign you’re getting older and value time more than money when it’s easier to shell out a tenner than to go hunting around dusty piles of old game CDs. I fired up UFO just to see how it looked (surprisingly good, I thought), then while I was there I figured I might as well allocate a bit of research, and then this UFO turned up so I sent out an interceptor, and, well, might as well go and investigate the crash site…

UFO has a slightly warped difficulty curve. Have you ever watched the old Doctor Who serials, when fearsome alien threats would be confronted by the brave lads of UNIT armed with rifles, the Brigadier would order “five rounds rapid”, bullets would have absolutely no effect on the Ogron/Cyberman/Dalek/Shambling-plant-thing/Plastic-death-beast, and the poor old UNIT chaps would be exterminated/vaporised/heat-ray-ed in short order? That’s the template for early UFO missions. You dispatch your brave lads (and lasses, no discrimination in the workplace of certain death here) kitted out in the finest protective armour the earth has to offer (beige nylon jumpsuits) with the most potent weaponry (the contents of the cutlery draw from the base canteen, plus a couple of rocks to chuck) against space aliens from planet alien space, resistant to just about anything short of a rocket to the head. Even though your team are the most elite soldiers earth has to offer (or possibly some bums who wandered in off the street, it’s hard to tell), they have an average of a 7% chance to hit anything smaller than a barn door more than ten paces away, while the pinpoint accurate aliens pick them off half way across the map with insta-kill weapons. Being turn based, it needs a bit of strategy; on early missions, I’d merrily send everyone roaming across the map without bothering to save enough action points to react during the alien turns, then watch helpless as they were shot, poked, eaten and generally had a pretty bad time of things. Learning from my mistakes, I’d form up a tight phalanx, a bristling hedgehog of firepower ready to meet threats from any direction, until a previously unseen alien lofted a plasma grenade into the middle of everyone and wiped out the whole squad. Once you played a bit, though, the options opened up; kitting out troops as grenadiers (and keeping them well away from the rest of the squad to avoid the fun of arming a grenade one turn, then that soldier getting shot and the live grenade rolling out of his twitching fingers…), the fearsome rocket launchers (avoid trouble with aiming by using a weapon with a massive blast radius! Only really effective when the aliens were standing near walls, though, in open ground the rockets tended to just fly past, off into the nearest town to take out a few civilians you were supposed to be protecting.) House clearing could be especially dangerous, stepping through a doorway behind which aliens could be lurking, but destructible scenery meant a high explosive makeover could create a really lovely open-plan living area. Or dying area, as the case may be. Armed with such techniques, your surviving soldiers would improve between missions, your scientists researched new and devastating technologies, and (with enough reloading of saved games) by the end the roles were almost reversed as you sent out armoured hover-tanks to scout the battlefield while your heavily armoured squad hid behind stuff using mind control powers, lofting multi-waypoint smart bombs and giggling.

So much other great stuff in the game, base building (including the possibility of aliens landing and invading, fighting it out on maps of the very bases you built), storming alien ships, (REALLY OLD SPOILER WARNING!) tracking the threat back to Mars… A truly worthy Best Top 10 PC Game In The World Of All Time Ever. Buy it now! Though if you’ve never played it before, it might take a bit of getting used to.

I like a good Achievement, me. I think it was the City of Heroes badge system that crystallised it; Achievement-y elements had certainly been a feature of games previously, like medals or promotions based on mission performance in flight simulators, and in the Grand Theft Auto 3 series I’d always studiously collect hidden packages or similar for in-game benefits, but CoH badges were really the first thing I collected for the sake of collecting. There are a few Accolades that confer a tangible benefit, but other than that there’s not much reason for having three hundred badges other than to say “Woo! I’ve got three hundred badges!” With XBox Live really cementing capital-A “Achievements” in the “doing stuff in games” sense (to the point that “Achievements” in Wikipedia redirects to the Gamerscore section of “XBox Live”) they’re popping up a lot more in PC games now, Team Fortress 2, Audiosurf and Mass Effect being three recent examples that spring to mind.

Having completed one run-through of Mass Effect including just about every side-quest I could find, I picked up quite a few achievements: all the general plot missions, level 50, the Paragon achievement for being a generally nice chap, completing 75% of the game etc. I’d carefully rotated all four weapon types to get the 150 kills achievement for each. It’s a splendid game, and I was quite getting into the combat, so I thought I’d take another run at it, make a couple of different choices along the way to see if the plot changed at all, and grab a few more achievements. I rolled a Sentinel, to pick up the Biotic-use achievements, and set it to Hardcore difficulty level, which so far I’m not having too many problems with (I ought to check in case I thought I’d set it to Hardcore, but actually left it on Medium…) The new character is called Bastard Shepherd. Not “Bastard” Shepherd, it’s not a nickname or anything, no, he was christened Bastard, and in a shining example of nominative determinism is attempting to rack up maximum Renegade points. So far this mostly involves shooting whoever I’m talking to: an NPC has surrendered, claiming they were under mind-control when they attacked you? “I don’t trust you!” *BLAM* A cell full of prisoners who’ve had their minds wiped? “It’s a kindness, really” *BLAMBLAMBLAM* One of the crew has second thoughts about the mission? *BLAM* Even though it’s just a bunch of pixels, I actually feel quite bad about making a lot of those choices, I’m not sure if that’s a sign that I’m far too invested in something that’s only a game, or just confirmation that I’m not really a sociopath who’ll gun anything down that gets in the way.

Finishing off this second playthrough should net the “Complete Mass Effect twice” and “Complete Mass Effect on Hardcore difficulty” achievements, but I don’t think I’ll go for broke and play through the whole thing twice more, on Insane difficulty, just to round out every “finish the game mostly using this NPC” achievement (I’d chopped and changed too much the first time to qualify, apparently). It’s good that they’re there, as per a previous post optional additions are a much better way of prolonging gameplay than mandatory crazy-difficult bosses or missions. Some achievements don’t seem like such a good idea, though; news from WoW suggests there’s going to be a whole bunch of “first to…” achievements, which seems pretty odd behaviour to encourage; raid boss kills, I can see that, there’s already fierce competition over world and server firsts, and it takes a prolonged effort to get a group geared and trained for the dungeon. But first to level 80? That’s surely just an incentive for account sharing or crazy not-entirely-healthy marathon play sessions. You could say “people are going to race to 80 anyway, why not give them a title?”, but to delve into the wildly inappropriate analogy for a moment, you could say people are going to drink to excess anyway, why not hand out a t-shirt for the first person to down 20 pints of snakebite in a pub? What else, achievements for ganking 1000 players at least 20 levels below you? Maybe our biting satire wasn’t quite as bitingly satirical as we thought… First to 450 in each tradeskill I can sort of respect as a logistical exercise in calculating the necessary raw materials, amassing as much as possible before the expansion hits, then engaging in a furious craft-off in the bank, rivals staring intently at each other as piles of unwanted belts, boots and hats build up around them… And first to level 80 on a heavily populated PvP server, I’d quite like to see the almighty ruck in the final zone if each side has a candidate for the title, waves of level 70s flinging themselves into futile combat just to slow the other side down a bit. Still seems like an awful lot of effort to expend in the first week (day?) of the expansion’s release, when it’s hardly as if anyone’s going to need any extra incentive to be playing.