DefconI played this with Sigur Ros's "()" | Submitted by the99th on Wed, 09/05/2007 - 04:54. |
You can download the demo of Defcon, for Mac, Linux or Windows, and play a limited version of the game for free. You should do that now. What you'll get is a deep strategy experience coupled with a harrowing example of the artistic power of games: the gameplay is itself a poetic expression of the horrors mankind might be capable of, and the personal moral implications involved. You score a point for every million people you kill -- I think that sums it up.
DROD is a game that autistic people might enjoy while on methamphetamine. Its a turn-based, dungeon crawling puzzle-game. The way that works is: you can move in one of eight directions, you can wait, and you can turn your sword clockwise and counter-clockwise, and every time you execute one of those verbs, a turn passes. Every turn, other things in the tile-gridded room you're in will move, and every x amount of turns spawn units will create things that move. Thats pretty much DROD, "invented" (because it is so primally iconic a game design) by Eric Hermansen back in the 90s. Since then, it has expounded on that simplicity with so much manic variation that thousands of people have subscribed to Caravel Net and flooded its message boards with help requests, new content ("Holds" as it were) and all kinds of crystallized culture only possible in a hardcore gaming super-niche like the DROD series.
