Articles with the Tag UFO

UFO (Enemy Unknown)

geekdom, science fiction
Published on



Found at James Nicoll’s, the title sequence of the old Gerry & Sylvia Anderson live action series UFO. Three years ago Brad Hicks called this his favourite retro future, which was when I first heard about it. UFO is one of those series that, if you didn’t catch it when it was first aired, you’ll never know about and I was much too young (or even born) to do that. Since then I have managed to watch some episodes and seeing this title sequence reminded me of how much it resembles a similarly named classic computer game, UFO: Enemy Unknown. So much so the 1971 television series has to have been an inspiration for the 1994 video game; which the Wikipedia entry indeed says it was.

UFO: Enemy Unknown is one of the best games I’ve ever played and one of the few that actually scared me. A combination of strategy/god game and tactical squad combat, the player is the leader of the X-Com organisation defending Earth against UFO attack, having to set up bases and manage funds to equip his squads, improve weapons and ships and do research. Once an UFO is signaled you can try to intercept it and if you do you can send a squad to capture it and capture or kill any aliens it carries. There are also alien infestations you may need to combat etc. It had relatively good graphics and decent, atmospheric sound effects for a mid-nineties game.

It was when you went to actually fight the aliens that the game got scary. You could only see what was directly in your line of sight, especially in night missions you had little visibility and at literally ever corner some alien menace could hide. Add the music and sound effects, which though synthesiser based were quite spooky, then play late at night with the lights off not to wake anybody up and it could make you jump when you turned a corner and some nasty mo-fo was waiting for you…

I remember one time I had loaded my squad on a Shuttle, which had landed on the site of an UFO crash, I had moved my first soldier out, who had been armed with a grenade launcher, moved out the second one, then some alien fscker psionically possessed that first soldier and got her to launch a grenade right into the shuttle. Whoops, that was the squad gone…

Shorter me: I really should dig out my copy of this game again…

Metal Monday: U is for umlaut

'Eavy Metal, video
Published on

After a one week break Metal Monday is back and this time it’s “U”‘s turn. There’s little to choose this week: the ülaut might be important in heavy metal, but there are few bands with a name starting with “U”. From the list at BNR Metal Pages there are only two bands I know and like: UFO and Uriah Heep. Neither is what I’d call properly heavy metal, or even hard rock, though they’re both certainly on the heavy side for rock bands.

UFO is of course best known as Michael Schenker’s breakthrough band; Schenker was only 18 when he debuted in UFO. Over the years Schenker has developed a reputation as a petulant manchild and troublemaker, but there was a reason UFO wanted him, as shown on these tracks.

Doctor, Doctor:



Rock Bottom:



Uriah Heep is an English band in the mold of Led Zeppelin, one of those bands that to me define seventies rock. Not very innovative, but straight up rock done very well, a little heavier than most. They’re not a band I turn to when I’m in a heavy metal mood, but I do like them a lot just because they’re so nicely seventies. Case in point: Traveler in time.



Or Sunrise:



Or Sweet Lorraine:



Outer space linkage

science fiction, Your Happening World
Published on

Some quick links to interesting stuff today that don’t need their own post. First up, the annual Strange Horizons fund drive. Strange Horizons is an excellent science fiction/fantasy site, publishing fiction, poetry, reviews, etcetera, with the staff all volunteers but with paid contributors. I use the site quite a lot when doing science fiction or fantasy reviews for the booklog, as their reviewers usually have their heads screwed up straight and I’m always curious to see what they think of the book I’m reviewing.

The Guardian has an interview with noted science fiction writer and friend of the blog Charlie Stross, in which the following quote jumped out at me:

“Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas, rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition,” he says. “I’m not entirely at ease with that self-description.” But with a background in biomedical and computer science rather than literature, his fiction always returns to science. “I just can’t help myself,” he explains. “I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being
content to examine them in their native habitat.”

That one paragraph explains so much about Charlie’s books.

Way back in February, Brad Hicks blogged about a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s live action science fiction series. No, not Space:1999, but UFO. When he described it, it sounded like it had provided a lot of the inspiration for the only computer game that ever gave me nightmares: UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-Com 1 as it was also known), which I played a lot in
the mid-nineties. Finally having tracked down the DVD set of the series myself and watched the first episode, it does remind me a lot of X-Com. Of course, it’s quite dated, as it’s a 1969 idea of what the far flung future of 1980 would look like, full with men in Nehru suits smoking and drinking in the office while purple wigged women in silver miniskirts watched out for ufos on the moon, while their counterparts on earth wore tight jumpsuits, which showed cameltoe could be a problem in the future as well…