important to give them the spark than give them the fire. I learned a sort of life lesson from the game. How do you complete an impossible task? One colossus at a time. X-COM: UFO Defense (aka Enemy Unknown) This game has been rated as either the best or one of the best videogames of all time by many publications. I am hesitant to call it /the/ best, but it is definitely the best strategy videogame of all time, a genre-mashing masterpiece before people even knew how to mashup genres. Subjective: When playing this as a kid I kept a written log of all of my soldiers that died and under what circumstances. Naturally, the list was quite large at the beginning of the game (I hadn't figured out the optimal strategies of only visiting crash sites or terror sites during the day, or to bring electro-flares) but it dwindled towards the end as my soldiers were on par with the aliens. In college I had a friend who decided to name all of his soldiers after our friends and would update them on their status as the game progressed. I could see how a succession game could be really fun, but I've never participated in one. I managed to play both the UK and US versions of the game; a locally-owned software store (whoa!) let you rent PC games (wow!) and it happened to stock the UK version, complete with the absurd bug-eyed alien that didn't actually appear in