The first installment of a series of articles on X-Com is now up at Man Bytes Blog. The articles, called Narrative of the Moment, will focus on the story aspect of X-Com, but this first one is more of an introduction with personal reflections. One bit that stood out to me is about the difficulty:


Now maybe I'm an amazing genius (unlikely since I'm typing this at a desk crowded with slinkies, light-up Virgin Mary pictures, and Pee Wee Herman figures), but I don't remember ever needing to refer to the manual to learn how to play X-Com. The interface pretty much seemed to clue you in to what you needed to know, like maybe that button with the little guy crouching will make my guy crouch or maybe that "Research" button means I should go there to research new stuff.

Manuals are for little girls.

On a non-sexist/ageist note: When I first started on X-Com, I skipped the manual and figured out what everything did by clicking on it and wincing when it went wrong. A lot of the game is fairly self-explanatory ("What the Hell does 'buy' mean?") and most of the functions obvious ("Wow, all my soldiers carry ladders with them? Get climbing, matey."). I remember referring back to it after months of playing, when I hit a difficult patch and was looking for stuff I'd missed to give me an edge, but didn't find anything apart from a pic showing an ability that wasn't in the game (gutted!).

Perhaps it's just the writer's strategic disability, namely:

I agree. X-Com has an impressively smart and simplistic interface which is completely selfexplanatory. I referred to the manual for interest factor at a later stage, but found it didn't tell me anything which I hadn't figured out myself in the first 30 mins of playing.

I referred to the manual for the copy protection codes. Those were the days

Jagged Alliance had a good manual. I read some bits of X-COM's, didn't find it particularly useful for reasons stated above.
Heh, at first I didn't know that I could use the RMB. Hey, I never even had a game that used a mouse prior to that!

I wouldn't say that the Battlescape buttons were particularly good, but trial and error worked.

I think I'll move this to the X-COM news section though.

I agree that the first two X-Com games were pretty easy to understand with a bit of experimentation. Clicking things randomly with the LMB then the RMB to see what happened was a bit of the fun.

The games can be complex, but they are still simple enough and an understanding of the underlying mechanics is not necessary to enjoy it.

These days I've picked up a number of games where I read the manual thoroughly then play the game. After a while I look back at the manual and wonder why it was even printed. It might just be a slip of information to tell you which buttons do what, or it's an extensive manual that tells you a lot while not really telling you anything on how to play the game or how things work.

- NKF

A lot of the really excelelnt games I've played, such as X-Wing, Tie Fighter and MechCommander had the sense to just print the keyboard commantsa on the back of the manual or on a separate sheet of paper so you dont have to read the manual to know what most things do

Yeah, games back in the day needed manuals. There was a saying at the time that after reading through a flight sim manual, you'd probably have a fairly good idea as to how to fly an actual plane...

One of the things I like about X-Com is that while it really isn't that difficult, it still does a good job of pretending to be (it doesn't actually matter if you lose the odd squad throughout the game, but it sure feels like it does).

For me, I suppose it's the soldiers who make the "story". You get attached to them - each is more or less unique, and even improves as you work at his or her weaknesses. However the poor blighters can all be killed at the drop of a hat. That's the sort of environment that legends come from.

Agreed. Tactical blunders getting a team wiped out will hurt short-term, but in the long run you get back up pretty quickly. (All right, on TFTD, I tend to semi-retire anyone surviving ten missions - it's a miracle they're still alive)

King of Dragon Pass also is excellent in this sense. Setbacks losing you a loved leader really hurt, but your clan is resilient and the game goes on. Losing through a negative feedback loop doesn't happen often, and you usually have a way out, even if it's a desperate one.

Agreed that the interface is fairly straightforward. However, some people prefer to have things spelled out for them rather than blindly click away and hope for the best. You really can't do too much damage on the Geoscape as the menu options are listed in words. On the Battlescape things are different as none of the buttons are labeled. The icons on the buttons themselves are quite grainy and hard to make out.

I started out playing UFO Defense on the Playstation (NTSC, US version). The manual (if you can call it that) was way too short and didn't offer much of anything. Folks with the PSX EU PAL version have a second part to the manual which is a reference section. That is gold as it goes into detail about a lot of stuff (including labeling the Geoscape buttons). Later computer versions of the game also had a fairly extensive manual which came out in PDF format. Guess I lived in the wrong place and played the wrong version to understand the game straight off. In another sense though, I'm fortunate to have started without any help as that forced me to write down (and eventually memorize) almost everything about the game.

- Zombie