Defcon: Everybody Dies

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I'll be getting it when I get paid on Friday. It basically has the look from the old Wargames movie and looks at the war-based politics of the Cold War. It's mainly a multiplayer online game where players take on sides, build up armies and facilities and watch on as the Defcon level raises (or is that falls?!) towards nuclear war.

Being a fan of Dr Strangelove, a relatively well-known boardgame called Twilight Struggle, and of understanding the concept of the Cold War (considering I was a child for the rear end of it) I'm definitely interested...AND my computer will actually manage the heavily stylized and simple graphics. The strategy of it looks like an interesting experience too.

[stokeriño]

I downloaded and played the demo... It's a short game. I mean, REALLY short. The strategy is good but there's a limit to how much you can do - placing silos, radars, airfields, surface fleets, submarine fleets, and tinkering with your alliances. Basically you spend about 10 minutes sorting all this out, and then (provided you don't have to deal with a lot of alliance backstabbing in the meantime, unless there's a random skirmish between surface fleets to sort out), you'll find yourself fast-forwarding to the point where you can launch nukes. You launch. They launch. You launch some more. Tally up the scores. Take a bow.

I'm not sure whether, if I did pay the £15 for its full version, I'd ever play it enough to be worth it. Fact is I'm mostly attracted to it by the coolness factor (essentially, the War Games-ness), and I can get that from the demo.

[Bushmeister]

Playing Defcon with mates is out of this world, one of the funniest multiplayer games I know. What you need for Defcon is some humour, a few good friends and a lot of twisted strategies to turn everyone else's territory into glowing, radioactive rubble inhabited by naught but cockroaches and Keith Richards.

Also, stokes, if you find Defcon a short game, maybe you should play it in Office mode. Hours of fun, guaranteed.

[Farmer Reil]

Short?

That's the one word I'd never use to describe it

It takes aaaaaaaaaages for things to happen, even on the fastest setting.

It is kinda cool to shout out "YES! 15 million dead! Take that, America!" when someone doesn't know what you're doing.

It's even better to do it with bbc.co.uk/news on your monitor at the time