DEFCON: Everybody Dies

[Cy-Fox Unit]

Game Name: DEFCON (also known as DEFCON: Everybody Dies)

Specifications and Information about the game:

System Requirements

Processor: Pentium III at a frequency of 600 MHz or higher

RAM: 128 MB or more

Hard Drive Space: 60 MB

Video Card: Steam's page on it says a GeForce 2 or better. I'm getting pretty decent performance out of my ATI Radeon Mobility card, so realistically I'd say that any video card that has at least 16 MB of video RAM (which is any card post-2000 really) can play it.

Multiplayer: Internet Connection. Can be done on dialup but I recommend broadband

Game Information

Developer/Distributor: Introversion

Format: Retail Box ($23.40), Digital Download (Introversion - $19.50), Steam Download ($9.99 - Which I really don't understand why Introversion sells DEFCON on Steam so cheaply but the rest is kinda high)

Demo Availability: There's two demos available. Directly from Introversion and on Steam (note that you require the Steam client for it)

Demo Limitations: This is basically the full game with certain features locked out. For instance, you can only play the Default game mode. You can start 2-player game servers. You can play against an A.I bot, and you can join any full version made server that is playing the Default game mode, and that doesn't have any other demo players playing. As soon as you pay for the game and enter the key, the features are enabled (Steam does this automatically for you in its version)

Synopsis: Remember the movie WarGames when NORAD is frantically at work trying to stop nonexistant Soviet missiles from turning us into radioactive dust? Well, this time the nukes are for real (in a metaphysical sense). DEFCON is a real-time strategy game that has you playing the impossible-to-win (so they say) game of Global Thermonuclear Warfare. You are put in control of the early warning defense system that consists of radar, missile silos that launch your missiles and also knock enemy missiles and aircraft down, airbases that provide fighters and nuke carrying bombers that are also capable of knocking out naval units. There's finally the naval forces. Battleships try to knock other ships out. Aircraft Carriers are basically mobile sea-based Airbases that can also hunt for stealthy nuke toting submarines. Submarines can attack passively. If your other naval forces can see it, it can attack it. Or it can take a big risk and use active sonar to hunt for ships, giving away its position. And then there's it's nuke launch sequence, which makes it the most vulnerable.

The idea is to target your enemy's cities for points. Wipe out cities (and their civilian populations) and get points. Get your cities wiped out and you lose points. Military units are not worth any points, but you will have to knock some out if you want to win. In certain cases, one can knock out an enemy's nuclear missile/air defense silo as they're launching nukes and stop the nukes from hitting their cities. (Takes a little luck, skill and finesse)

DEFCON is at its core, multiplayer. There is no single player campaign but like Counter-Strike Condition Zero, you can set up single player games where you go up against A.I players. There's also variations on the default gameplay mode. Big World for instance, makes the map twice as vast, making it take longer to move your forces along. Diplomacy is basically a game of nucleaer Chicken. Everyone is allied together but at some point, someone's going to be itching to push the "Leave Alliance" button and throw some missiles at someone for some reason (Kinda like the Cold War!). It'll slowly break down into a cutthroat game where you may still have allies, you may not. Unpredictable.

All in all, despite that there's not very many people actively playing it anymore, DEFCON was big in its heyday, and I for one want to get support for it back up and rolling. I'm contemplating the idea of setting up a Sonic community DEFCON group on Steam. If any of you have it and want to arrange some matches, I can be contacted by PM or IM

Now for some eye-candy:

(From Introversion)

This one I took myself from a little experiment yesterday. I wanted to see how an all out assault on a region by the rest of the world would go, and ended up creating a giant nuclear flare that took a couple hours to fade just a little bit. Eventually the game crashed though =/