Let's Replay X-COM UFO Defence #13: The Calm Before the Chaos

Channel:

Kikoskia

Subscribers:

57,000

Published on May 13, 2018 8:30:02 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u-o3-bmN8g

Game:

X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)

Duration: 20:03

9,622 views

277

X-COM is a game of extremes, of intense action but also intense inaction. It may be the battlescape where skirmishes with the aliens are won and lost, but you can lose before the skyranger even sets down to the mission if you haven't prepared well enough in the geoscape phase. As such, what you do in the so-called quiet times between encounters is critical to the success of X-COM, in the now and the future. It's when the aliens aren't attacking - at least, you hope they aren't - that you research new technologies, build and expand bases and manufacture the equipment you need to triumph and it's all done with an impending sense of inevitable doom.

It may be quiet in terms of activity but the geoscape is anything but a time to be calm and relaxed, as you're constantly working against the clock, a clock you can't see. A terror mission could come at any moment in the month, a UFO could be detected in the air or on the ground and all the while they're up to something. Maybe they're building a base while you research a new weapon, perhaps they're trying to infiltrate a funding nation to sever their funding or maybe they're just causing havoc and panic. In the back of your mind you know that the quiet can't last and that you must get as much as you can done before it ends, hopefully ready for the next challenge the aliens throw at you. And all of this is done with the aid of the music, building a sense of dread and yet of silent hope.

But the quiet never lasts, not forever. In time the aliens will strike again and with luck, X-COM will be ready for them.

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