My Name is Stuart and I am addicted to X Com.

This is a confession. I have been slowly losing my life to this addiction and it has to stop. I have been hurting sentient life from other planets and dimensions for my own filthy addiction and I haven’t cared how I got my fix.

Look at this shit

I had better start with the beginning. A long time ago, all the cool kids were into turn based combat, it was the in-thing. I wanted to fit in so I tried Final Fantasy X on my Playstation 2 but it was a bad trip. The story was awful and all the characters looked like they had been designed by someone experiencing both a split personality and massive head trauma. The turn based combat itself was tedious, watching the characters repeat the same inane actions over and over for ages until the battle was won. My only reward? Pushing the annoying bastards forward to the next mind numbingly boring battle to while away the hours of my life. This was not for me!

I told my friends that I didn’t want to be cool, if this was what it took. I stuck to real time combat and I stayed healthy. Fortunately this fad didn’t last long and soon turn based combat was relegated to dingy cellars and attics where sad, hollow beings spend hours with calculators working out which stats to increase on their spiky haired personalities which have more life than their users. That was the end of it, or so I thought.

Fast forward more than a decade and turn based combat has come back in a new guise. I knew it was bad news, but a friend talked to me about it. He said turn based combat had changed. It wasn’t about stupid looking gits whining about to esoteric situation, this time, it was about fighting off an alien invasion with big burly men and big burly women. The game was getting high score reviews everywhere you looked and once again, my curiosity was peaked. The demo appeared on the Xbox live market place and I gave in, deciding that I would be just as bored as I had been before.

I couldn’t have been more wrong

Before I knew it, I was selecting a squad to fight off an alien menace, I was picking their weapons and skill sets, their armour and sending them out into battle, choosing optimal routes of attack, sending my snipers to higher ground so they have an advantage, making sure I don’t get out flanked. I was in heaven.  

You see, I was always a huge fan of Real Time Strategy games. While they had advanced, my laptop, the one I am typing this on, was a hybrid engine of steam power and hamsters on treadmills. 

Unfortunately steam and hamster power doesn’t work together very well and 8 steamed alive hamsters later, my computer can barely run basic programs at the same time, let alone a high end Real time strategy game.

There had been attempts to make Real Time Strategy games on the console market, but sadly, the controller is not suited to this, and made every battle an exercise in frustration and defeat. Xcom solves this problem by using a mixture of strategy and turn based action which is satisfying almost to the point that it would be illegal to play it in public and especially not in front of children.

When the mission is over, you return to your base which isn’t just a mission hub, it’s also a vital part of the game, making sure you keep funds coming in from countries in the world so you don’t run out of money, keeping aircraft ready in those countries if a UFO is spotted above them, making sure the base has enough power, workshops, scientists and engineers. There is a whole litany of things you can build in the base, all there to provide support for your team and hell for the invading aliens.

You raise your team members from frail humans with normal machine guns to the point where they are armoured titans, striding across the battlefields as a tightly knit team. Snipers dealing with long range enemies, assault troops being the grunts, heavy weapons soldiers to take on the tougher opponents, support troops with med kits and tasers to capture aliens. I was even giving them stupid nicknames. Mr. Cuddlebums was the name of my heavy weapons expert from the first level of the game and I have still kept him alive since then and in that, is where my real shame comes from.

You see, in Xcom, troops get stronger with each mission, develop their own specialties and tactics and soon become your primary soldiers. Unfortunately, when your soldier dies, they are dead forever. All that work, all that experience can be ruined by one berserker running up to him and tearing out his anus through their oesophagus.

Farewell Soldiers. You're killing aliens in heaven now

I could not handle that. I needed my favourite troops to stay alive. I didn’t want their names on the memorial wall  So I saved. I saved every time I thought my troops were going to be in danger. I saved before I started a mission and I saved after it. I reloaded so often if one of my team were killed, and the first thing that came to my head was “NOPE!”.

Xcom had made me something I’m not, a Save Spammer. Cowardly, unwilling to take defeat because I knew that one step back meant eight steps forward for the alien menace. I don’t need to make a game that is already pretty bloody difficult any harder.

So this is my confession, I spend hours on Xcom but do I really accomplish anything?

You bet your arse I do! DIE ALIENS DIE!