It's a good game, though, pretty different than the standard games being released these days and I hope that it can start the ball rolling on the gaming industry at least moving a bit away from Modern Warfare clones.
However, I don't really want to talk about the state of the video game industry here, or even too much about the game X-Com. Just hang on, I'll get to the point eventually. I just need to get some details out of the way first.
So in X-Com you're the commander of a secret organization called "X-Com" (shocker.) You spend your time alternating between decided what sort of research and development to undertake in your base and then commanding a squad of soldiers to fight against aliens on the ground.
The ground fighting is the part of the game that takes up most of your time and it's the part the we need to focus on for this entry.
The game is surprisingly tense, scary even. The soldiers you control are pretty vulnerable and can be taken out in one or two unlucky shots. Combine that with the slow pacing of searching for unseen aliens, sometimes just hearing them scuttle around the outskirts of your visual range, and by the end of the harder missions your nerves will be pretty frayed.
Now, when I was a child--and really still even know--aliens were my particular boogieman. Some people are afraid of ghosts or demons or zombies. Some people are afraid of serial killers or cancer (much more reasonable fears) but I have always been scared of aliens.
I know aliens aren't abducting people--don't think that I consider this a rational fear. Fear is rarely rational at all.
As a child, probably from ten or eleven up until seventeen or so, I did think aliens really were coming to Earth and snatching people up from their homes in the night. You have to realize that this was right in the middle of the X-Files decade and before the Internet was really around to allow a young kind unlimited resources with which to research the idea of UFOs flying around in the night, striking people with beams of light and taking them away for all sorts of horrific shit. My sources for understanding aliens and how they interacted with the people of the planet were limited to movies like that, the X-Files, book with titles like UFO Encounters and late night specials on the Discovery Channel (this was back when Discovery seemed like a pretty reputable source and only played their crazy alien shit late at night when most people didn't see it.)
I realize that these days the idea of being actually afraid of an alien is somewhat laughable. Even in the 90s when aliens were more like zombies in terms of popularity people treated them, in general, as more like a joke than a threat. People sold stuffed "grays" and wore t-shirts with UFOs on them.
But to me, in those younger years and even to a degree today, aliens were never a cute thing, or a joke or something. I would read the accounts of people who claimed to have been abducted and feel chills. Even now when I listen to that stuff I get freaked out. Even though I know it didn't really happen, even though I know there aren't aliens creeping around my door or looking through the windows of my house.
Just imagine. Try not to let your popular concepts of aliens interfere with your perception of it. Imagine lying in bed at night, imagine awakening and seeing the bedroom door ajar with something that is not a man standing in it--someone tall and impossibly thin, looking at you with flat, doll-dead eyes. Really stop and think about that realization, that you are not alone in the house, and that the thing standing in the doorway, looking down at you is seeing you, knowing where you are.
Don't look away from the screen, don't look behind you.
Imagine the thing moving towards you, imagine not being able to move, even to scream. Imagine that flat, emotionless face looming over you, inhumanly long hands wrapping around your mouth and pulling you from the bed.
Imagine how the skin on your neck would prickle up if that thing was in the house now, moving around, watching you from behind, staring through a window. Looking at you the way you might look at an animal in a zoo.
That's fucking scary, isn't it?
Even now I still can get pretty freaked out by alien movies as an adult. I still sometimes have nightmares about them getting into the house. Hell, I even really liked the movie Signs just because the aliens scared the shit out of me.
I think most people have a thing like my aliens, something, either a monster or a type of person (or a specific person) or even a concept or thing that they get scared of just even when they know there's nothing to be afraid of.
I've always been interested in fear, of the feeling of being afraid. When I was young I'd seek out the alien stuff just to give myself those tingles. I devoured Stephen King books, Lovecraft books, even old issues of Creepy and Eerie that my older cousin had lying around. When I realized I wanted to write things my first thought was to write scary stories. I've moved away from wanting to be the next Stephen King (that is a lie. I'd love to be as successful as him--I'd be happy to be half as successful as Dean Koontz) but the idea of writing scary stories still fascinates me.
I often wonder why people enjoy the ghost story so much. Because that's what the aliens, the demons, the zombies and the vampires are in the end--just ghost stories, people gathering around and saying "this is real, something evil is out there, be afraid of it." I think maybe it's a kind of survival mechanism originating from the caveman days--stay near the group, fear what is different, here there be dragons. A way to keep people in the tribe or whatever close to home and away from all the incredible dangers of our ancestor's world.
I mean, prehistoric man actually did have monsters to fight. Not imaginary ones. Things like smilodon are scary no matter how advanced you might be. So maybe our fear, even our enjoyment of fear, has evolved from the times where we needed fear to survive. Maybe the thrill of fear even came around as a way for us to seek out things to fear so we might better survive them when they came seeking us.
Either way. Aliens.
They're scary.
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