One of my soldiers spotted an alien, had a 92% chance to hit and still missed, then got shot by an alien from further across the map and killed. The alien that my guy missed then took a potshot at another of my men but hit the car he was using for cover instead.

Then, stupidly, I didn't realise that the car was on fire and it blew up - and as I hadn't moved my guy that turn, he got killed in the explosion.

I use http://www.spotflux.com, which is a program you download that seems to work well.

Also has x.com at the end of the URL, which is strangely apt.

From what people tell me, no-one has ever been banned from Steam for using a VPN to unlock games early

As that's functionally equivalent to "I flew to the US on business, booted my laptop, and my game unlocked" I think it's unlikely to result in any problems. I'm really very surprised it works though.

I might enjoy this but I couldn't get past the tedium of the tutorial.

So... uh... turn off the tutorial?

I don't think you can on the 360 demo. Lord knows I was hammering all the buttons an' all.

I don't think you can on the 360 demo. Lord knows I was hammering all the buttons an' all.

This is an absolute mother fucking triumph.

This is an absolute mother fucking triumph.

play through the game without anyone dying should be my goal.

Does not compute.

Anyway, so I'm basically setting myself on mission impossible if I try to complete the game with any of my soldiers dying?

It's not impossible, but it would certainly be a) frustrating, and b) not really what the game is about. The whole point of the X-COM games is that losing men and failing missions is expected. You can pull the game back and win it from seemingly hopeless situations, so it doesn't matter if you lose occasionally.

apparently, it is harder to "pull it back from the brink" in the new one simply because the panic levels increase so rapidly

It'd be like expecting World War II to have ended with no allied casualties.

How can someone be "mortally wounded with a long recovery time"?

I have an unusual recommendation to make. If you should try out XCOM: Enemy Unknown, try the following settings for your first game: Easy difficulty level, and under Advanced Options select Enable Ironman. If you played a lot of the original XCOM and many tactical games since, you might try Normal and Ironman, but for most people I'd recommend Easy. By enabling Ironman, and thus not being able to constantly save and reload when things go wrong, you will get a real sense of consequences. And using a lower difficulty level instead of the "hidden" way of making the game much easier with saves and reloads will make your first game a lot less frustrating. You can work your way up from that afterwards.

XCOM is a game about consequences. A game about interesting decisions. And the only way to make decisions interesting is to offer the possibility for any decision to turn out to be wrong, and to have negative consequences. XCOM is a great game for that, but for people who weren't around when games like that were made in the early 90's, that can be a bit of a shock. If you are too cocky, especially in the first game where you don't understand all the strategic impacts of your decisions yet, you can easily end up with a "game lost" instead of a "game won" screen. There aren't many games around these days that have an actual loss condition, unless you play against other players. Even more shocking: While some negative consequences are a result of bad decisions, sometimes you lose a soldier just by bad luck. It is interesting to read on the internet how many people have a problem with that concept.

There are two major parts to XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The first is a strategic part, where you plan the defense of Earth against the aliens. Resources are scarce, and you need to make sure that you have both adequate means to detect and shoot down UFOs, and to battle aliens with your soldiers. The latter is the second part, a turn-based tactical game. There are tons of different maps, and different scenarios, from alien abductions, rescue missions, capturing a downed UFO, to invasions of an enemy base. The strategy part looks a lot simpler, but is in fact somewhat more devious: Bad decisions can have strong consequences several hours of gameplay down the road. Thus my recommendation to learn about strategy and consequences on Easy Ironman.

XCOM currently has a Metacritic score of 89, which is unusually high for a turn-based tactical game. Especially since it isn't without flaws: The tutorial sucks with too much hand-holding, which is unfortunate because that is what you get to play if you download the demo. The character animations in the cut-scenes aren't great. And the free move the aliens get when you spot them gives them a rather unfair advantage. But compared to other turn-based tactical games that have come out this decade on the PC, XCOM is probably the best.

Bought from Game and am installing now. Bafflingly Disc 2 says, "For sale in India only."

How much was it from Game?