My copy of DEFCON arrived today from merry ole’ England – I’d almost forgotten I’d taken the download + boxed option. Very nice looking package; at least on par with mainstream commercial releases in the same price range, with a heavy stock glossy postcard to boot.

A very humourous manual was included, which you can see over here.

Incidentally, to see why I enjoy this game so much, take a look at this thread. The maturity displayed by even the preteens is remarkable; a rarity in general and particularly astounding in the online gaming world.

UPDATE:  If you are here, you should probably be there, reading that post instead. By all means, read this too, its a bit embarrassing seeing how long it took me to zip up these BMPs.

In my previous post, I mentioned a modification I made for DEFCON. While it’s not quite ready for release, I thought I might put up a few screenshots to give y’all a taste. Note that the impetus was to make this as accurate as possible, so I will use the right icon when possible, even if I personally prefer the default graphic. Also, limitations of the game prevent me from making this truly compliant – but I think it’s pretty good .

Many of these were taken from an online game. If you were in that game and object to one of these screenshots, let me know.

Russia gets hammered by subs, while Indian silos remain in AD mode.

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Continuing the theme of my last post, of late, I’ve been fooling around with DEFCON. Any game which needs to register www.everybody-dies.com to hawk itself is worth a look in my book. DEFCON is produced by Introversion – a small British software game company which revels in that image, proclaiming themselves to be “the last of the bedroom programmers.” With four main developers and a small support staff, this company has turned out three games since 2001 – Uplink, Darwinia, and DEFCON – all with deep gameplay, critical acclaim, and cult status. Introversion has a definite style to their gaming experience – low hardware requirements, simple and elegant graphics, reasonable cost, incredible replay value, and inspiration drawn from popular geek icons. Uplink owes much to Gibson novels and games like Shadowrun, Darwinia recalls Tron, while DEFCON is obviously a playable version of Global Thermonuclear War from the movie that inspired a generation of hackers (and war* hacks): Wargames.

The game is so addictive that merely watchiing others (or the computer) play is eerily entrancing. Playing induces remarkable highs and lows – depending on the fate of vector inspired graphics. I was so inspired that I have actually created my own graphical mod for the game, which replaces the units with NATO APP-6a / US MIL-STD-2525b symbols, that I will distribute in the next couple of days.

One of its most attractive features is the capacity to form alliances to share air defence and RADAR data. Negotiations can be done through an in game chat system which allows public, team, and private communication. However, there is only one winner in each game, and betrayals and defections are common as people jockey to reach the top.

The game is not perfect – most notably, polar trajectories are not possible, which is very unrealistic – even WOPR switched to polar projections – but thankfully so is the game. Mod support could be better; while Introversion supports very open standards for the game media, modifying gameplay to the degree possible with their previous offerings is as yet impossible. There is a lot more that can be done with this game, and certain aspects could be polished up, but it is a load of fun as is and worth a look, even if you aren’t a gamer. The demo allows you to experience much of the registered version’s fun, so go download it now. You may also want the recently released 1.1 patch.