Saturday, September 30, 2006
Is it a game, or is it real?
Straight out of the movie WarGames, only 23 years later, is this very cool new game, DEFCON. The website is even an awesome name, http://www.everybody-dies.com It's a reference from the end of the movie when WOPR computes the outcome from the game "mutual assured destruction."
It's really a lot of fun to play. The interface and graphics are a fun minimalist design. The arching trajectories of the missles all heading to their targets give you the sense of "oh crap!". It's a very simple game at it's base. With only 5 types of mobile units and 3 base structures. It's played in 5 levels of Defcon. The first two placing resources and strategies for those resources, Defcon 5 and 4. Then at the third stage the small skirmishes can begin. Then only at Defcon 1 can the nuclear strikes begin. Then it's pretty much fight till everyone is out of nukes and... everybody dies.
But where it gets interesting is that you can form alliances, break those alliances and all kinds of little things you can imagine out of the cold war. There's chat in the game so as you play online, deception and lieing can really be par for the course.
Introversion who made Defcon are some cool cats from the UK. They're really the closest we have to modern day garage game developers. I had played their first game Uplink shortly after it first came out. It was a very cool, you're a hacker, game with an interesting computer type interface. They then released Darwina which was an rts with a odd twist. I didn't play Darwina so I don't actually know too much about that one. But all three are now up on steam, so it's very cool to see that direct publishing appoach working for the indy developer. ¶ 9:16:00 AM
It's really a lot of fun to play. The interface and graphics are a fun minimalist design. The arching trajectories of the missles all heading to their targets give you the sense of "oh crap!". It's a very simple game at it's base. With only 5 types of mobile units and 3 base structures. It's played in 5 levels of Defcon. The first two placing resources and strategies for those resources, Defcon 5 and 4. Then at the third stage the small skirmishes can begin. Then only at Defcon 1 can the nuclear strikes begin. Then it's pretty much fight till everyone is out of nukes and... everybody dies.
But where it gets interesting is that you can form alliances, break those alliances and all kinds of little things you can imagine out of the cold war. There's chat in the game so as you play online, deception and lieing can really be par for the course.
Introversion who made Defcon are some cool cats from the UK. They're really the closest we have to modern day garage game developers. I had played their first game Uplink shortly after it first came out. It was a very cool, you're a hacker, game with an interesting computer type interface. They then released Darwina which was an rts with a odd twist. I didn't play Darwina so I don't actually know too much about that one. But all three are now up on steam, so it's very cool to see that direct publishing appoach working for the indy developer. ¶ 9:16:00 AM
