I had a lot of fun with it, but have mostly gone cold on the rest of the Introversion output. I picked up Defcon, but it just didn’t work for me.

Unfortunately, this seems to be Introversions curse. They could make the best game in the world, but it would go over 90% of their audiences heads. They’ve not made a bad – or even average – game yet, but it seems that they earn a little more ire from an increasingly ornery userbase with each release.

If they come back to single-player games of the non-RTS variety, they’ll get my dough again and with a big smile.

See article:
“It’s a Venn diagram where the crosshatch between people who love retro graphics, people who love indie games, people who love Darwinia and people who love online, competitive multiplayer is… no people at all. It’s like 100 people.”

That’s the single sentence, and I agree with it. I really like Introversion, in principle. I loved Uplink, and I really liked Darwinia; I would have been happy to give them more money to get a neat new game from them. But they put out Defcon, a multiplayer only game. I don’t really like multiplayer, and I don’t have a big group of friends who all bought Defcon. So I skipped that one, hoping their next game would be back to stuff I loved. Instead, it’s a multiplayer-only remix of Darwinia. Sigh.

That ethos of “we don’t worry about marketing and customer demand, we just make the great games we want to make” is endearing in an underdog indie company, but as an actual paying customer, you need a company to understand what you want and, well, make that.

Long story short, after browsing various wikis I ended up reading a big document detailing the effects of a hypothetical nuclear exchange in the late Eighties, and now will probably have problems getting to sleep tonight. DAMN YOU INTROVERSION, FOR SOME REASON!

*twitches*

The idea of Dwarinias is cool, little single polygon AI beings evolving over thousands of generations ect but that has very little to do with the gameplay which I found to be very slow paced and tedious. Dwarf Fortress gives you little beings with even less polygons (0) and they REALLY have AI that is rather advanced and they really do grow and learn and have life experieces which can scar them for the rest of the game (say they’re horde of cats gets caught in a lava flood, that dwarf will never be the same again!)

IF they made an AI simulation based around Dawinia where you really could have a world that allows them to grow and live ect I would buy that right up.

I did REALLY like up-link though. Let me live out of my fantasy of being a haxor.

In the age of the Internet you can show immediate gameplay footage to tell me what the game is like. But here the Multiwinia streamed video has no gameplay footage, only frozen 3D stills with some artsy piano music. It’s okay for a teaser, but not to sell a game that is out and has finished gameplay to show footage of. So I go to the Darwinia section to see what that’s like and the only streamed video is to Steam, and (perhaps since I have VLC as my default media player) the link doesn’t give me anything.

All I really want here is a short video showing me what it is these iconic little men do and how the game plays. A link to a YouTube video would suffice, but after searching and not finding anything, my lunchbreak is over and my attention turns to other things, perhaps never to return to the Introversion website again.

Okay, the last part is just elaboration, I probably will be back to see what IV is doing, but the average person who doesn’t know who IV is will not. For someone to spend £10 on a game they really don’t need to see a lot of footage or detail, but the basics need to be explained and not in an abstract way. Simply tell people what your game is, show people in-game footage of the gameplay as you describe it and they should have enough information to part with £10. The streamable videos on the site don’t do this.

If only someone could be more protective about PC titles we wouldn’t have to live with the horrific ports that plague the PC shelves and online stores such as Steam.

God, yes. We really, really need this. I mean, what is going on with Games for Windows branded titles? They were supposed to set – and force developrs to adhere to – certain standards. And yet, we’re seeing titles like FEAR 2 where the devs still haven’t had the decency to enable proper mouse button support. And what about the initial 16:10 aspect ratio debacle? Microsoft clearly just doesn’t give a crap about enforcing their rules on GfW titles, unlike Xbox titles.

And, I’m sorry . . . but I still can’t feel a lot of sympathy for Introversion. They, as a small independent developer, bet the farm on working with a partner like Microsoft. Microsoft! Did they really think they weren’t going to be pushed around? Now they’re living with the fallout from that decision, which nearly killed them.

Most of it seems to stem from lack of business experience, and all the issues with project/time management, quality control etc. These are hard lessons to learn, and I hope they’ve not picked them up too late.

But I’m still looking forward to any further games they make, as they’re always at least very stylish.