If I had to pick my top 5 games of all time, the original x-com would definitely be in there. Sadly, after the demise of Microprose the license has been horrendously mismanaged and there hasn’t been a good x-com game since the first sequel. There have been a couple of commercial games that aspired to emulate x-com but none have been particularly good, Jagged Alliance 2 being the lone exception. Tonight I stumbled across not 1 but 3 promising looking efforts to recreate x-com for the modern age:

• ufo 2000 takes the media from the original game and has made a multiplayer version of the tactical combat engine from the original game. This looks very promising and I would love to play against someone. It’s open source and comes precompiled for Windows, dunno if someone has gotten it going on Macs but the linux client works.
• Project Xenocide aims to recreate the entire x-com experience from scratch, geoscape, research tree, tactical combat, craft interceptions, everything. They’re hoping to ship by the end of this year and what they have so far looks great
• Last and in some ways most impressive, UFO – Alien Invasion is based on the quake II source code from Id Software. It’s the most impressive looking of these efforts by far, and has a team working on it that have previously completed at least one project. The only downside is that so far they haven’t added destructable terrain, though there is some hope they will in a future release. If you’re going to check out just one of these though, this is the one to scope out now, it’s the most playable 1 player experience

I should mention that the original developers of x-com went on to make a play by email game called laser squad nemesis that has a good implementation of a similar tactical combat engine. It’s missing a lot of things from the original x-com, but it’s been around for a couple of years now and they’ve been steadily adding features. Soon it will have a solo game and elevation levels, and at that point, I’ll be buying.

…goes to a a rogue-like of course (lately I’m most partial to T.O.M.E. but you can pick from among dozens – ADOM, Angband and Zangband are all particularly good). But that’s not what I want to mention with this post. I stumbled across a very cool 3d action game called Neverball. If you’ve played Super Monkey Ball on one of the various platforms that support it you’ll be immediately familiar with the gameplay (or if you knew someone who had one of those old Labyrinth table games) – you must tilt the playing surface such that a ball that rests on it makes its way to the exit, picking up bonus objects and avoiding various hazards as you do so. This is amazingly polished for a free game. Don’t be put off by the spartan webpage design, the game is great fun and well worth the small download. The early version of a minigolf game based on the same engine is worth grabbing too. These are available for Mac, PC and Linux so pick your version and get rolling.