Defcon [Game]

by | Games
Reply

I finally went and tried out Defcon. It was originally released about four years ago. I had seen screenshots of the game before, but never tried out the demo and was curious about how the game played strategically. It was interesting how it’s setup – how your units have different modes, and it takes time to switch between modes. For example, your missile silos can switch between attack mode (where they can launch nukes) and defense mode (where they can shoot down nukes). The switch happens slowly, and the time-delay means making yourself vulnerable and planning ahead. I managed to get 6/7th of the way through the demo before I misunderstood what I was supposed to do, launched all my nukes, but didn’t destroy one of the enemy missile silos that I’m supposed to destroy. This resulted in the tutorial not letting me progress any further, so I had to bail-out of the game. It was disappointing that they didn’t plan for the contingency that players might not do everything right, and get caught in a situation where they can’t progress any further.

Video of Defcon gameplay:

One of the surprising things I noticed on their blog is that they almost shut-down in March. Their latest game wasn’t selling as well as they’d hoped and they were out of money. From their blog, Aug 20, 2010:

Internally we knew within about an hour of Darwinia+’s launch that it hadn’t done well enough. It took us about two weeks to really accept that and the awful realisation that we didn’t have enough to continue with the office or the staff. We had a bunch of creditors knocking at the door, but worse than all of that we were absolutely shattered. Darwinia+ had been really drawn out and I’d spent a lot of time selling the future to the team and when the rug was pulled away from my feet I really didn’t want to continue. Critically, neither did Chris. He’d had to spend a lot of time on Darwinia and decided that we had failed to live up to our original mission of making “Original Video Games”. Striking out on his own made most sense given IV’s failure: “We tried it your way, Mark – didn’t work”. So we started shutting things down. We reached out to our creditors and (amazingly) they accepted our payment plans. We closed the office and sold the tables and chairs. We let Gary, Leander and Martin go (another three that can be officially added to Nicholas Lovell’s redundancy tracker). They were amazingly stoical about it and I’m glad to say that they are all doing well. Then we closed the door on Introversion, rewrote our CVs from scratch, and started applying for jobs.

I guess this was rock bottom. We’d been through crises before, but we’d always wanted to solve the problem and find a solution, this time it was a bit like there was nothing left to save.

A couple of weeks rolled by and I found myself unable to accept the end. Chris too wasn’t actually ready to jack it in…

They managed to limp through it, even though they had to let people go from the company. I was pretty surprised to hear about their money problems since they’ve made a number of games I’ve heard of – Darwinia and Defcon being the most notable. Admittedly, I haven’t been very aware of stuff they’ve done in the past few years. Like I’ve said before, it’s feast or famine in the indie game business.

Google Earth, Now With 100% More Trees

by | Cool Stuff, Video
Reply

Just thought this was pretty cool. What’s next? More accurate architectural models? Sliders so users can see the city in different years and historical periods? Accurate real-time traffic models?

Update: Google Earth already contains historical data. They do this by overlaying old maps over the same location. Though they don’t have 3D models of the locations.

The Walking Dead

by | Bad Corp
Reply

I’ve been wanting to check out The Walking Dead (AMC’s zombie series). Unfortunately, I don’t have a television. I don’t know why, in 2010, companies still don’t put all their shows on the internet. I knew their first episode was going to be available for free on their website, but even that didn’t work. (I got a “file not found” error last night when I tried it, and today it just redirects to the show’s main page.) Short of buying a television and cable (and why would I do that, especially since I’ve never seen it; not even the first episode), there’s no decent way to watch the show short of pirating it. Sometimes media companies make absolutely no sense. (End of rant.)

A google link that doesn’t actually lead to a video of the first episode:

Update: I found the episodes on Amazon ‘Video on Demand’. I wasn’t big on paying $2 an episode, I’d much rather have commercials, but I went ahead and bought a few episodes anyway.

Wikipedia Donations Graphic

by | Miscellaneous
Reply

I thought this was a pretty interesting graphic. Wikipedia tried a variety of campaigns to get people to donate money. Here’s the graphic put together by InformationIsBeautiful:

Out of curiosity, I decided to run some additional numbers. If Wikipedia is getting $47,433 per day with that ad, and we assume that they continued to earn that much each day indefinitely (which is questionable), then they’d earn $17.3 million per year. In contrast, the Encyclopedia Britannica earned $650 million in 1990 (their peak year). There are some other differences (like the fact that some people might’ve felt that their contribution to Wikipedia was to fix and refine articles, and the fact that Britannica had printing costs), but I also can’t help but think that it says something about the donation model.

(By the way, I also think that having a free publicly available encyclopedia for everyone is a kind of social good, so I’m not arguing that they should charge subscription fees in order to earn a lot more money. Just thinking about the donation model in general.)

Pirating My Own Game (Part 2)

by | Piracy
Reply

I tried again today to pirate my own game. I was hoping I could manage to avoid a virus this time. I went around and around, visiting dozens of sites. One site, I managed to download a 200+ MB file that was “cracked”. Once I unpacked the rar file, I had a whole bunch of compressed files that I didn’t know what to do with. Most of the other sites I visited required that I sign-up before I could download the file. (They don’t tell you this until you go through a few steps; obviously, they’re using it to drive sign-ups to their site. No idea if they wanted to charge money.) I still remember one pirate site that gave a download description that said the game was “uninspired” (heh, thanks for pirating it and panning it at the same time). At least another pirated copy included the suggestion that “if you like the game, buy it”.

I don’t have any bittorrent software installed on any of my computers, so couldn’t try any torrents. Trying to find a usable copy was a huge headache. It seems like I spent over an hour looking around and ended up with nothing. I eventually just gave up.

While I tend to come down hard on piracy and pro-piracy arguments, I wasn’t really angry when I was looking around for pirated copies. (Strangely, I was angry when I saw that guy at the coffeeshop cracking iPhones and installing pirated apps for people; and none of that piracy involved my own software.) My attitude was more just kind of an apathetic “meh, these things happen” with a curiosity about whether or not they actually have a cracked copy. Part of my annoyance with piracy is just the fact that pirate justifications are so bad. Also, the game’s been out for a year, so it seems like a lot of people who were going to buy the game, have already.