X-COM: UFO Defense Retrospective
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X-Com is a brutal and complicated game. One random shot is enough to turn the tide of a mission, and no amount of planning or purchasing can keep everybody alive. Even though I didn't have a handle on everything that was going on when I was 11 or 12, playing it for the first time, I couldn't stop. I'd play games until my situation became hopeless, long after countries had pulled their funding and started aiding the alien menace. It was never surprising; I skipped every terror mission because I was afraid they I'd be up against chryssalids. Even more than a decade out of my preteens, those things are pretty scary.
I wasn't very good at video games as a child, so the fact that I'd always lose didn't detract from my enjoyment of the game. I just liked killing aliens for as long as possible. But as I grew up, X-Com grew with me. By high school, I could survive a game saving often and loading when things went horribly wrong, as they often did. I stopped saving in one of my college years, and that's when I finally learned how to play the game. I stopped running my guys ragged every turn and built new bases early and often.
