A post on Coding Horror yesterday reminded me of this. As Jeff notes, its hard to describe, but the gist of it is Dr. Sepulveda has created a virtual world full of peeps he calls Darwinian’s. Unfortunately when connecting it to the world wide interweb, it gets infected by a virus. You’ve got to help wipe out the virus and give control back to the Darwinian’s.
Obviously its not quite a simple as that, but it is definitely a back to basics strategy game. And its addictive as hell. The later levels take ages to complete but they’re so absorbing. I love the graphics too. Very old school, but they just add to its charm.
I was originally going to buy it from their website, however it appeared on Steam back in December so I get it through there.
I have a couple of niggles though. On my NVidia enabled box (a 6600GT) it tends to barf and crash it, causing a nasty blue screen and reboot. I suspect its video drivers and Darwinia combined. I’ve tried different drivers, but to no avail. But I can forgive it because its created by 3 lads and not the Collective with its army of testers and hardware. On my ATI laptop I have no such problems, but it has a 9700 Radeon Mobility, so its not exactly speedy.
There is an interesting interview and preview of their next game, Defcon, in this months Edge magazine (Issue 160). Unfortunately not on the Edge website. They also mention that in the first three weeks of Darwinia being available on Steam, it sold more copies than they had through their website in the previous 9 months. Ouch!
Comedy Bonus Link: What is Love? #2 and #3 are my faves. Note: The rest of that site is NWS.
ha! you got darwinia afterall! a pity it crashes on you. i had no problems with mine year ago. everything worked well, looks like steam distributive is a bit fucked?
Only played the Demo of Darwinia up to now but it sure was some good fun.
I don’t think that I’m going to buy the game as I probably won’t find the time to play it, although Introversion Software deserves every pound you can spare. As both their first game – Uplink – and Darwinia are brilliant, I’m sure that Defcon will rock too.
[…] Seems like the Defcon demo on Steam (the new game from Introversion) suffers from the same weird problem I had with Darwinia in that it just randomly crashes and reboots my machine. It’s kind of annoying since I’m not able to get through the tutorial and it looks like a really cool game. Seems to be a graphics driver issue that at the moment I don’t have the time to look into. […]