X-COM: Interface Investigations

I've decided to take a little break at this point, since I haven't got very much new to discuss about my playthrough. So I thought I'd spend a bit of time discussing the X-COM interface. It's often criticised, but perhaps it would be helpful to go through what it does well, and what it does badly. It's also important to remember that the game was released in 1994, and interface design has come a long way since then. In a future post, I'll be comparing and contrasting to the modern XCOM reboot.

The first part of a new game: Selecting your first base location

 So here's the first point, and it's a crucial one. This game has almost nothing in the way of in-game help, no tool-tips to tell you what a button does, no in-game tutorial, no in-game manual or wiki. These sorts of things are more commonplace now, but they just weren't a priority back in the 90s. Disk space was expensive, and it was far more common to put together all this information in a single helpful place: The manual.