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The brainchild of Julian Gollop and other assorted Microprose personnel, UFO: Enemy Unknown was produced in 1993 and unleashed upon the European gaming public. A year later, it jumped the pond to grace American players as X-COM: UFO Defense, since there was a naming rights conflict with an American-made DOS shooter called UFO. By either name, X-COM puts the player in command of an eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit charged with protecting Earth from an alien threat, managing resources and researching captured technology in the process. The hybrid of Real Time Strategy (improving X-COM's overall condition and catching UFOs as they land - or crashing them yourself) and Turn Based Strategy (exploring crash sites, stopping terror attacks, and defending and assaulting bases) quickly won the hearts of the gaming public.

Almost 15 years after its initial release, UFO Defense still attracts players and tops lists of the Best PC Games of All Time. A 2007 assessment by IGN has it edging out fellow Prodigal Son of Microprose Sid Meier's Civilization IV for the Number 1 slot.

Not to say the X-COM legacy is a solo act, however. While Gollop's team set to work on X-COM: Apocalypse, an in-house crew at Microprose beat him to the punch with X-COM: Terror From The Deep in 1995, a Mission Pack Sequel created to satiate player demand for more alien-assaulting action. Apocalypse hit the shelves in 1997, to mixed reviews due to its Art Shift into pseudo-3D futuristic graphics and the clunkiness of a newly-introduced real-time option for playing missions. The last days of Microprose (and its acquisition by Hasbro Interactive) saw X-COM trying to get back on its feet with two Genre Shifted offerings: X-COM: Interceptor (1998) kept the base management elements while ditching the strategy missions for space-bound Flight Simulator action, while X-COM: Enforcer (2001) ditched the strategy part outright to make a First Person Shooter running parallel to the timeline of UFO Defense. Sadly, neither had the mystique of their ancestors, and are often shunted away from canon due to the Unexpected Genre Change (and in the case of Enforcer being So Bad Its Horrible).

While the possibility of a future X-COM game continues an infinitely long march towards zero due to the license being passed through a variety of incapable hands throughout the 2000s, the earlier games attract a variety of player-made mods and remake attempts in numerous stages of completion. Various Spiritual Successors also exist, such as UFO: Aftermath and its sequels Aftershock and Afterlight (unrelated to the game UFO listed above), the Game Boy Advance sleeper Rebelstar: Tactical Command, and Laser Squad: Nemesis. All have attracted moderate attention from X-COM fans, largely for either the similarity in gameplay (the UFO: After series) or the connections to Gollop and other former X-COM staff (Rebelstar and Laser Squad).

In recent memory, the Lets Play team at Something Awful has done the unthinkable to the series: expand its cookie-cutter Alien Invasion plot into a coherent, witty, and most importantly epic tale of humanity's struggle to persevere in the face of continued alien aggression. Forumers GuavaMoment and Jade Star have collaborated to tie the X-COM and UFO games into one story - requiring some serious backdating on Jade's part, since UFO: Aftemath normally takes place about 50-80 years before its Fanon placement at the tail end of X-COM: Apocalypse shortly after 2084.

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Tropes exhibited by the series proper include:

• Alien Invasion: Duh.
• Aliens And Monsters: Mostly aliens, but their Terror Units are often engineered (genetically or otherwise) to either capitalize on their owner's strengths (Chrysalids having weaponized the Snakemen's rapid asexual reproduction, for example) or cover their weaknesses (Sectopods distracting the enemy with conventional attacks while their Ethereal masters make with the Mind Rape).
  • But what of the Mutons' Terror Units? Silacoids and Celatids are more Goldfish Poop Gang material.
    • Superior to the Mutons in one aspect: They are better at dying.
    • The flavor text makes them sound a lot more useful, though. And trust me, if Incendiary damage worked right in UFO Defense, Silacoids crapping fire as they move would make an excellent deterrence mechanism.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: Several missions involve "Harvester" UFOs sent to meet the aliens' carnivorous needs. They are, of course, equipped with Cow Tools.
• Anticlimax Boss: The Alien Brain at the tail end of UFO Defense. See the page for examples of just how pitiful the final fight can get.
• Anyone Can Die: And anyone WILL die until you've got solid armor research going.
• Armor Is Useless: A soldier with maximum health and the best armour can still be killed in one shot if the damage roll is high enough.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Aliens only in the first two games.
• Awesome But Impractical: Several weapons and base components, either due to how easily their replacements can be researched or by being Nerfed by the game mechanics.
• Black Cloak: The Ethereals take 'em in orange.
• BFG: Blaster Launchers and their counterparts.
• Body Horror: Chrysalids, Bio-Drones, several of the Apocalypse aliens, and so forth.
• Brainwashed: The common state of victims of Ethereals, high-ranking Sectoids, and their successors. Often, they're also crazy.
• Bullethole Door: Great for reducing the effects of Drone Jam during Terror Missions. Busting through the walls of UFOs, however, will take well-placed plasma holes (interior) or Blaster Launcher shots (exterior).
• Charles Atlas Superpower: With sufficient training, a soldier can eventually beat out a tank in health, movement, accuracy, etc. Oh, and tanks can't get those nifty Psi abilities.
• The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard: Most prevalent in UFO Defense, where aliens don't suffer from Fatal Wounds unless they were inflicted under previous mind control, magically know the entire map (and your soldiers' positions) after Turn 20, and can target any of your soldiers as soon as just one is in visual range (particularly rage-inducing with Ethereals' psi-spamming).
• Cool Ship: Completing a game often requires research and construction of an "Ultimate Craft" and interrogation for the whereabouts of an alien stronghold to drive it to.
• Cow Tools: Aliens bases and some ships are filled with these. Some you can research, some just look appropriate.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted - Soldiers lucky enough to survive alien gunfire (and that won't be many of the unarmored ones, mind you) will leak HP from "Fatal Wounds" to their various body parts until they fall unconscious and are either treated with a Medi-Kit or left to die. More often than not, it's the latter.
  • Played straight with Cyberdisks. Due to how 2x2 monsters work, a stunned cyberdisk is effectively a dead cyberdisk. Actually killing it results in a rather impressive boom.
  • Played straight in Terror From the Deep with Bio-Drones.
• Cutscene Power To The Max: Inverted - the opening animation of UFO Defense features troops facing down Mutons with Personal Armor, a couple of the beginning rifles, and an Auto-Cannon. By the time you normally face Mutons, however, you'll be trampling them with Powered and Flying Suit-equipped soldiers packing any combination of Psi-Amps, Laser Rifles, Heavy Plasmas, or Blaster Launchers.
• Demonic Spiders: In the early game, candidates abound- chrysalids (able to go from off-screen to melee attacking in one turn) and ethereals (champions of psi-spamming) deserve special mention as frustrating and unfair enemies. Later in the game, this is reversed and a strong squad is virtually invincible.
• Drone Jam: Civilians are NOT your friends during Terror Missions. They move about at random, block your movement from place to place in the process, provide excellent breeding opportunities for Chrysalids outside of your visual range, and turn hostile when you mind-control them away from enemy fire (thankfully, as they're unarmed, it's a token hostility). If you're not particularly concerned with their well-being, you can always claim that Some Dogs Need To Be Shot. Otherwise, check the page for nonlethal civilian control methods of varying degrees of effectiveness and hilarity.
• Dummied Out: The "Alien Reproduction" item and research line in UFO Defense - strange considering the resultant Half Human Hybrids wind up playing a key part in Apocalypse.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Regardless of the difficulty your campaign starts at, most of the games will see fit to ramp up alien activity to correspond with consistent positive performance.
• Earth Shattering Kaboom: Interceptor's Nova Bomb is designed to take out a star and everything orbiting it (a lower-level Class X-2 on the Apocalypse How scale).
• Easy Logistics: Averted so very hard. While ammunition for conventional weapons can be bought as long as you have money, more advanced weapons require manufactured or captured ammunition to work. And then there's allocating a limited stockpile of Elerium between manufacturing and aircraft fuel.
  • Moreso when XComUtil's "Improved Laser Weapons" fix is implemented. Sure, the Heavy Laser finally gets Auto Shot capability, but must it come at the cost of using Elerium for Laser construction AND not being able to make Plasma weapons (even after taking into consideration that the aliens drop Heavy Plasmas like candy)?
• Elaborate Underground Base: A necessity due to X-COM's covert nature, often leading to All Your Base Are Belong To Us should the aliens stumble upon it (hopefully "them" by the time an Alien Retaliation fleet comes calling).
  • Aliens get these, too. Which you have to break into to kidnap high-ranking officers for interrogation to complete the game.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: The UFOpaedia in its various forms across the generations. Even more so the fansite of the same name.
• Exploding Barrels: Fuel drums in your bases, gas pumps in Terror Missions, and certain UFO components all explode when shot. Frustratingly, so do Elerium pods exposed to explosions.
• Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong: Chrysalids, oh God, the Chrysalids... Tentaculats and Brainsuckers fill their niche in Terror From The Deep and Apocalypse, respectively.
  • Brainsuckers cross it with People Puppets.
• Flying Saucers: One of the smaller alien craft in the first game take this form, as does the first X-Com built craft. The Cyberdisc is essentially a miniaturized flying saucer with a powerful plasma cannon.
• Fun With Acronyms: The fact that a robots' rights group in Apocalypse would call itself the "Sentient Engine Liberation Front" clearly indicates that they deserve more credit than they're given.
• Game Breaker: Arguably, any human Psionic capability. At least, till Apocalypse rolls around...
  • Good Bad Bugs: Most every release and patch of UFO Defense has introduced or fixed a couple of these. Whether they are to be exploited or patched depends on how Nintendo Hard you want your X-COM experience to be.
    • Sadly, their evil twins are just as commonplace in Terror From The Deep.
• Global Currency: Everything bought and sold in the main games is apparently done so in U.S. dollars.
• The Greys: But of course.
• Grid Inventory: Multiple grids throughout the body and uniform (and multiple Time Unit costs for movement of items from location to location) make a refreshing take on the Inventory Management Puzzle.
  • The true Inventory Management Puzzle (at least in the first game or two) was deciding what 80 pieces of gear to bring along on a mission. A fully loaded transport could consume 40 of those slots just giving each soldier a gun and its ammunition. And that's without bringing extra ammo for reloading.
• Hive Mind: The aliens in UFO Defense take orders from one, another in Terror From The Deep tries to play Cosmic Horror while it's at it, and the Biomass in the UFO games is a weapon designed to turn a planet into one.
• Hold The Line: The objective of any Base Defense mission.
• Immune To Bullets: Because of how armour works and damage is rolled, certain enemies are actually immune to standard rifle or pistol rounds. Some are even highly resistant to otherwise powerful alien weapons (hello, Sectopods and Lobstermen).
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Speaking of Sectopods, a misprint in their Encyclopedia Exposita entry means their primary weapon counts as a laser attack (which they're weak to) rather than a plasma attack. Combine that with the fact that 2x2 enemies have to be mind-controlled one block at a time and that blocks controlled by opposing sides can fire on one another...
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Best way to describe the accuracy of any Rookie. Bonus points if their Shooting Accuracy is low. More bonus points if attempting to Auto Fire. Jackpot if they're suffering from Fatal Wounds in one or both arms.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: About 75-90% of gameplay revolves around the acquisition, understanding, and implementation of cool alien toys.
• Just Before The End: The aliens in Apocalypse invade from a doomed, volcanic planet in another dimension where most other life has been scorched away by the local star's supernova.
• Les Collaborateurs: Repeated screwups in a particular funding nation or outright political manipulation thereof by the aliens can result in said nation cutting its remaining funding to X-COM and signing a nonaggression pact with the grey bastards.
• Mega Corp: About ten major ones in Apocalypse, among a few others it'd probably be a good idea to defend against alien infiltration.
• Mind Probe: A handy tool for either side to gather information on the other.
• Money For Nothing: UFO parts and corpses sell quite well and X-Com itself can self-finance through arms manufacturing.
• Multinational Team: You recruit from around the world. However, recruit names are exclusively drawn from Russian, French, German, Japanese, and British/American pools (the last two being a little difficult to distinguish).
• Nightmare Fuel: Chrysalids again. But they're just the tip of the iceberg once you factor in Bio-Drones in Terror From The Deep, what with the majority of them being still-conscious human brains strapped onto a submersible weapons platform and implanted with alien control modules.
• No Waterproofing In The Future: Weapons and other technology developed (or reverse-engineered) during the decades of fighting in UFO Defense are completely useless underwater, so, in Terror From The Deep, you must restart the researches from scratch. Consider it a Justified Bag Of Spilling... that is, unless you're a clever enough hacker to exploit the similarities of the UFO Defense and TFTD engines and carry over goodies whose quantities were stored in the same data addresses.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: The same staff of scientists does everything from reverse-engineering captured weapons to designing new aircraft to interrogating prisoners.
• Only A Flesh Wound: Averted. Arm and leg wounds will greatly reduce a soldier's fighting ability, just like head and torso wounds. And that's on top of bleeding to death.
• Organic Technology: All sorts of purpose-bred aliens in the first two games, and practically every aspect of the alien threat in Apocalypse. The UFO games invert this, with bio-weaponry becoming more and more scarce throughout the sequels.
• Powered Armor: Later armor suits in UFO Defense (and the whole lot of 'em in Apocalypse) use Elerium-115 to power shielding, muscle enhancers, and the occasional flight module. Flight and protection are the only benefits; armour has no bearing on a soldier's strength or other stats.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Recruits can be either male or female. This has absolutely no effect on starting stats or stat growth. All it does is paste a slightly different head on the sprite and give ladies a different scream when they die.
• Red Shirt: The default state of every X-COM recruit. Turning them Mauve is a Luck Based Mission in itself.
• Roboteching: Blaster Launchers and their diabolical waypoint-based targeting system.
• Self Imposed Challenge: Probably the greatest fan-mod undertaking for UFO Defense is fixing a bug that locked the starting difficulty of the game at "Beginner".
• Sequelitis: After the original, the overall quality of each successive installment of the series was lower than the previous, regardless of their genre.
• Sequel Stagnation: Averted. After Terror From The Deep, which was basically an underwater rehash of the first episode, new elements and even Genre Shifts were introduced - unfortunately, they didn't result in good games.
• Shout Out: The Calcinites in Terror From The Deep bear a laughable resemblance to the titular antagonist of the B-movie Robot Monster due to them impersonating old-school divers. Enforcer also features a mishmash of resources from two fellow X-COM titles scrapped during its development, Genesis and Alliance.
• Squishy Wizard: Ethereals' bodies have atrophied so much that their self-sustaining functions have to be governed by their immense Psychic Powers. Which does not prevent them from having the best armour values and second best hit point totals among the non-terror unit aliens.
• Strong Flesh Weak Steel: Individual soldiers, in the late game, are far stronger than tanks, since soldiers improve their stats and tanks don't.
• Stun Guns: From Stun Rods to Stun Bombs, a variety of nonlethal arms gradually come into X-COM's possession and employ for the capture of necessary live aliens.
• Tech Tree: While almost all physical alien artifacts can be researched as soon as you recover them, several conceptual lines of research require either the interrogation of live aliens or a series of prerequisites.
• Telepathic Spacemen: Ethereals, experienced Sectoids, many of the Terror From The Deep aliens, Psilords in Interceptor, the list goes on...
• This Is A Drill: Terror From The Deep features a series of power drills that are the most effective weapons against Lobstermen. Combine with Mind Control to conserve ammo.
• Time Keeps On Slipping: The various incarnations of the Geoscape allow you to pass the time by anywhere from 1 second per second (slowest setting in Apocalypse) to 1 day per second (fastest setting in UFO Defense and Terror From The Deep) while you're waiting for the next alien sighting.
• Unobtainium: Elerium-115, in spades. Ununpentium has long been theorized to work that way, but currently doesn't. Also, Terror From The Deep's Zrbite.
• Un Winnable: The state of any Terror From The Deep game in which the Tasoth Commander has been researched. Thankfully, patches and mods keep this (and other deadly bugs within the Tech Tree) from happening.
• The Uriah Gambit: Note that the post-mission analysis does not have a spot for "X-COM Operatives Killed By X-COM Operatives." Your use of this oversight to justify friendly fire or the immediate court-martial of an alien-controlled operative will practically be a given.
• Vendor Trash: All those alien corpses, spare UFO/USO compoments, and ammunition? Yeah, a good deal of that gets sold off to finance the organization. Even a relatively small UFO captured intact can net nearly a million dollars depending on how much loot you hold on to. Alien corpses are often extremely convenient for research, but supply exceeds all possible demand, so selling them is a non-trivial but disturbing source of income. (A strategy guide suggests that they make for excellent sushi. And a certain fan wiki suggests that bases frequently fighting Lobstermen requisition above-average amounts of butter.)
  • This Troper markets his dead Ethereals as "Psycho Jerky." (Sectoid officers count as a mild flavor.)
• Violation Of Common Sense: Someone explain to me again why buildings in Apocalypse have their "crumple points" on the freakin' roof?
• We Sell Everything: Played straight until Apocalypse, which required you to maintain good relations with a variety of Mega Corps to obtain troops, aircraft, weapons, safety from police interference, etc.
  • Strangely, We Buy Anything is not similarly averted. However, apparently Adam Smith Hates X-COM's Guts, since market prices for player-manufactured items in Apocalypse can only go down.
    • It should be noted that although We Buy Anything is in effect, you should never sell your Entropy Guns. Seriously, don't do it. At that point in the game, some corporations will have been taken over by the aliens and you'll have effectively given the enemy access to their Infinity Plus One Sword.
• What Measure Is A Non Human: Asked by S.E.L.F. and the Mutant Alliance in Apocalypse as they fill X-COM's needs for robotic and alien-hybrid soldiers, respectively.

As an added bonus, tropes exhibited by the Let's Play series:

• After Action Report: Each chapter of each Lets Play is given as a journal entry by Otto Zander (the X-COM games) or Vault (the UFO games).
• After The End: Rather than be the beginning of its own series, UFO: Aftermath is portrayed as a follow-up to the Downer Ending of the X-COM: Apocalypse LP.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: President Andrew Jackson pops up to help "the Excombs" fight the good fight in UFO Defense. Despite having been called from nearly 200 years in the past, he's pretty damn good, sporting the second-highest Psionic ratings for the Kiryu-Kai squad (behind Otto Zander himself).
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Dr. Lily Takakumi in UFO Defense, to excesses.
• Continuity Nod: To accommodate the otherwise forgotten Enforcer and Interceptor (and keep the more canonical games interesting), GuavaMoment employs a variety of narrative devices. Then again, that depends on whether you can really view XComUtil and embedded Vimeo clips of several FMVs as narrative devices.
• Dis Continuity: Witty anecdotes about Terashell's ghost harassing those who insult Dr. Takakumi? Perfectly fine. Convoluted subplot about Torlon trying to stabilize Terashell and Allen Wren's ghostly manifestations? Thrown into the "Shit That Never Happened" pile.
  • A good chunk of the UFO: Aftershock LP is in danger of becoming this, due to Jade Star's save files becoming corrupted. In the wake of the somewhat controversial Wham Episode, though, this is partially for the better.
• Legacy Character: Any appearance of Coolswa is obligated to be accompanied by copious amounts of (mostly friendly) heavy-weapons fire.
• Nightmare Fuel Unleaded: If you thought the Chrysalids were bad on their own...
• Poirot Speak: Heinrich von Paxicon speaks the German variety in UFO Defense, referring to his Stun Rod as "ein stick."
• Real Life Writes The Plot: Jade Star's computer issues during the production of the UFO: Aftershock LP have given to some... inventive skits on the supporting goons' part. See Running The Asylum below.
• Robotic Reveal: Sort of - it's a given that Soup-Bot in Apocalypse is a robot. Not so much that he's also the leader of the Sentient Engine Liberation Front AND the ex-protagonist of Enforcer.
• Running The Asylum: Apparently, there's a food war going on in Aftershock thanks to Ackbar's calls for a "Falafel Friday" to mirror Burrito Night. Then the Waffle faction started joining in. Then the troops started trying to out-seizure each other with an array of flashing avatars. Thankfully, with Jade making normal updates again, the forumer contributions have backed off on the insanity.
• We Can Rebuild Him: Canuck into Robo-Canuck during UFO: Aftermath.
• Wham Episode: Canuck-Errant's The Sims 2 interludes for UFO: Aftershock took a turn for the unexpected with a surprise lesbian tryst between Gillian and Pumpkin. Granted, Canuck was cooking the affection rates somewhat, but the wholly unintended result still has goons in an uproar.

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