I think Terror from the Deep 1996 is the superior game but thats subjective.
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Its superior in couple aspects, but even more punishing.
So I find it for veteran players
What I love about the first X-Com (Ufo Enemy Unknown) was the many lovely details they put into it. A friend of mine and I played a terror mission (sitting in front of our 386DX with 4MB of RAM) and there was an alien next to a gas pump at a fuel station. We were asking ourselfs wether or not to shoot the gas pump to blow the alien up with it and decided not to try it because the devs surely did not think about that. We shot at the sectoid, missed it, hit the pump and it blew up, killing the sectoid. WOW
Terror from the deep: once in a while there would be the parts of a crashed plane to be seen in an under water mission… The version of TFTD that I bought (I think it was already on CD-Rom) included a piece of paper with a fictional Story of a mission from the view of an XCOM soldier - that was something very special back then.
On the other hand - 2 bad things we tend to forget (and that were fixed by OpenXcom).
1 The search for the last alien: Once I literally searched for hours for the last living alien on a huge ufo mission - just to find out that the first alien I (thought I had) killed had only been stunned and was standing around the edge of the map. I loooooooved Jagged Alliance 2 for switching from turnbased to real time if you had no enemy contact for a few rounds.
2. The game did not really safe how your soldiers were equippeded. Once I spend 20 Minutes to prepare my squad for a mission that ended after 5 because most aliens had been killed by the crash of the UFO.
A funny thing that happened to me once in OG as well in 2012 XCOM was winning the game by alien suicide:
- OG: a panicking Etheral shot mother brain.
- Xcom 2012: a hurt Etheral killed the Überetheral by draining his last health
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While I hated it had ground and underwater weapons separated for team (and not for aliens) I found TFD story even more Lovecraftian and complex, and alien design great.
That was if you had newer powerful weapons like plasma for ships and hit small and medium UFOs. I liked sight of destruction but yet aliens fighting back with large and huge UFOs
Interesting 
There is no more teleporting, yes, but enemies still are distributed on he path between yourself and objective&evacuation zone. Play missions enough time and your learn where enemies have been placed. Try to sneak by and enemies will adjust their positioning to be on your way - useful for setting ambushes.
Some of the missions in WotC seemed to change it and I appreciated it that - generally those without hard counters and they can have a less linear progression.
Still, it’s better then enemies coming out of the area that you just scouted. I also remember this weird bug when all enemies would spawn in one room - I had a battleship battle when all enemies waited for me in the final room and activated all at once.
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