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And if you want to get a better understanding of Nuclear War, try this game:
Defcon
https://www.introversion.co.uk...

http://store.steampowered.com/...

The only winning move is not to play!

Ok some alternatives then, Prison Architect - https://www.introversion.co.uk..., Europa Universalis 4 - http://www.europauniversalis4.....

That said the higher the profile the game the more likely they are to come stuck to steam. Borderland series, Xcom series, Civilisation series. They all work in linux but they come via the steam system. But that is no different to windows.

And if you want to pop over to Humblebundle.com now they have 2 bundles of which some are linux compatible. But they are all steam delivered. One is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II which while long in the tooth is a good game.

Having played a substantial amount of Defcon, I can vouch for the validity of this.
Unless you have a potential ally you have doubts about. Then you want to keep a few just in case he stabs you in the back. You're screwed regardless, but it at least is an incentive for him not to be a dick. If course, even if you sneak a sub up there and get a "first strike", you can't actually negate the opponent's capabilities and millions are screwed even if you play a flawless game. But that's one of the overarcing points of the game. Everybody dies.

If you have an itch to play a relatively straightforward sim game, give Prison Architect a look. The game is exactly what its title would suggest: a prison simulation in which you're the architect designing the prison. New alpha releases come out about once a month, and they're actively soliciting feedback from players, but it's already entirely playable and very enjoyable. It's surprisingly addictive to go through a quick cycle of building a prison, identifying issues in your design, selling it, and then using the proceeds towards a new prison that fixes that design issue.

I've already lost a few dozen hours playing it.

Yes, Darwinia, from the same guys who gave us Uplink and DEFCON.

Way geekier, cooler, and prettier.

Spin Glasses is just nerdly.

Hah, that graphics and typography reminded me of my favourite Linux game. ;-)

There is a game based on this very principle. I didn't even make ith throught the training.

Interesting, looks like it'd pass for a sequel to Uplink.

Ten years on, it's amazing how many things that game got right.

The Darwinia and Multiwinia code has also been available (for a price): http://store.introversion.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=66 , but this is the first I'm aware of the DEFCON code being released.

Actually it costs £30/€34,50/$45.
see this. (thank you AC)

It never came with it, it was separate. You can buy it here

Uplink Developer CD and it's non-FOSS license with instructions on how to compile using MS Visual C++ 6.0 so what's different about this 'new' release?

Uplink Developer CD and it's non-FOSS license with instructions on how to compile using MS Visual C++ 6.0 so what's different about this 'new' release?

Uplink Developer CD and it's non-FOSS license with instructions on how to compile using MS Visual C++ 6.0 so what's different about this 'new' release?

License linked from humble bundle: http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/developer/license.html

No, I want to play full scale thermonuclear war.

No true hacker does it for points.

The hell you say :)

Once again, life imitates art.

No, he doesn't. Those indie developers are, like it or not, part of the industry. If they're willling to eat rice for a year just because they'd rather code in their parents' basement than at a Nintendo cubicle, that's just fine. Their being inconvenient to Nintendo's sense of status quo is not a valid point. It's rather a symptom that the status quo might be changing. He's trying to say "we are the industry, their not", which is obviously crap.

Walmart sales bread. Does that mean that the little, bakery in the corner is not part of the "bread industry"? And of course you know that what the little bakery sales is fresher and tastier, while Walmart sales tons of shit labeled "bread".

I, for one, would rather have countless small companies such as www.introversion.co.uk than two or three big motherfuckers endlessly delivering the same rehashed games.

I think you forgot the "stuff that matters" part. I don't know about you, but a story about a real case scenario involving nuclear warfare seems pretty worthy of attention.

Yeah, I've been waiting for the expansion pack to this for years :)

If Anonymous is made up of random people who care about the issue of the moment, how do you investigate them over time? I can't see how they would all care about the same things, as it's not like Anonymous hires people to do stuff.

Of course you can't. Anonymous is a shifting mob of whoever happens to give enough of a damn about something to do something about it at the moment. "Something" (for the white-hats among us) could be as innocuous as posting a link to Fark about some asshat throwing puppies into a river as part of a campaign to get something to go viral. Or (for the stupid and/or criminally-inclined) it could be as assinine and wrong as participating in a DDoS attack. It's the modern-day equivalent ImprovEverywhere's brand of flash mobs surrealist theater.

By giving Anonymous a group identity, authoritarians - who seem incapable of conceiving of anything as loosely-organized as a flash mob - miss the point. They also miss the target. A few of the dumber and/or more criminally-inclined individuals get nabbed, but Anonymous remains unscathed, for it is legion.

Unless there's some sort of "Anonymous Hacking, LLC" I haven't hear of...

No, but The Uplink Corporation has been hiring for almost ten years. The storyline bears a pretty good resemblance to what's going on right now between Wikileaks, its supporters, and the rest of the world, right down to big buckets of encrypted data containing secrets that change the fate of the world, and The Powers That Be planting bogus arrest warrants on their enemies as they struggle to control it.

"Where in the world is Julian Assange"

No, we're not playing "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego", we're playing Uplink.

The game setting was "High tech computer crime and corporate espionage on the Internet of 2010". The game was written in 2000, and they got just about everything right. Even the date, so it would seem. (Seatac Astronomy indeed :)

In response to Manning's mission to "Copy File" (and a successful "Trace a Hacker" mission performed against Manning with a little help from Lamo :), it seems Assange's incessant runs of "Copy Database" have finally prompted the AI to respond by escalating from this:

Someone just escalated from a mission to do this:

Change Criminal Records:

(Help to discredit one of our rivals)
Ranking: Intermediate
Difficulty Rating: 5
Required Software: Password Breaker, Proxy Bypass/Proxy Disable v1.0, Decypher v1-v3

Connect to the Global Criminal Database (GCD), and click the Log in button. If you have the Proxy Bypass, [ ... ] enter the search section. Enter the Target's name, and wait for it to come up. If, for your mission, you are required to clear someone's record, simply click the 'Clear Record Button'. Otherwise, enter what ever conviction you need to, and click 'Add'. When you are finished, disconnect from the server, and reply to the mail to receive your money.

...to this:

Ruin Life:

Mission Description: Highly-skilled agent required for removal job.
Ranking: Knowledgeable
Difficulty Rating: 8
Required Software: Password Breaker, Proxy Bypass/Proxy Disable v1.0, Decypher

"Connect to the Global Criminal Database, and break in as you did in previous missions. Enter the search section, and type the target's name into the search box. When his record comes up, you will need to add 2 criminal convictions (It doesn't matter what, you can have them arrested for anything). Once you have added 2 things, add something with the word 'Parole' in it (i.e. 'Broke Parole'). Once that is done, click the 'Authorise Arrest' button, close the box that pops up, and disconnect from the GCD. Clear your logs, then go to the Uplink News page, and fast forward 3 hours, until the Arrest appears. Once it has, reply to the mail and finish the mission."

(If you remember Uplink, it's worth a quick replay, if for no other reason than to compare the in-game headlines with Slashdot's over the past year or two. If you don't, it's short and cheap enough that it's worth playing. Poking around the website, it looks like Introversion's currently working on something that looks an awful lot like a sequel. WANT!)

"Where in the world is Julian Assange"

No, we're not playing "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego", we're playing Uplink.

The game setting was "High tech computer crime and corporate espionage on the Internet of 2010". The game was written in 2000, and they got just about everything right. Even the date, so it would seem. (Seatac Astronomy indeed :)

In response to Manning's mission to "Copy File" (and a successful "Trace a Hacker" mission performed against Manning with a little help from Lamo :), it seems Assange's incessant runs of "Copy Database" have finally prompted the AI to respond by escalating from this:

Someone just escalated from a mission to do this:

Change Criminal Records:

(Help to discredit one of our rivals)
Ranking: Intermediate
Difficulty Rating: 5
Required Software: Password Breaker, Proxy Bypass/Proxy Disable v1.0, Decypher v1-v3

Connect to the Global Criminal Database (GCD), and click the Log in button. If you have the Proxy Bypass, [ ... ] enter the search section. Enter the Target's name, and wait for it to come up. If, for your mission, you are required to clear someone's record, simply click the 'Clear Record Button'. Otherwise, enter what ever conviction you need to, and click 'Add'. When you are finished, disconnect from the server, and reply to the mail to receive your money.

...to this:

Ruin Life:

Mission Description: Highly-skilled agent required for removal job.
Ranking: Knowledgeable
Difficulty Rating: 8
Required Software: Password Breaker, Proxy Bypass/Proxy Disable v1.0, Decypher

"Connect to the Global Criminal Database, and break in as you did in previous missions. Enter the search section, and type the target's name into the search box. When his record comes up, you will need to add 2 criminal convictions (It doesn't matter what, you can have them arrested for anything). Once you have added 2 things, add something with the word 'Parole' in it (i.e. 'Broke Parole'). Once that is done, click the 'Authorise Arrest' button, close the box that pops up, and disconnect from the GCD. Clear your logs, then go to the Uplink News page, and fast forward 3 hours, until the Arrest appears. Once it has, reply to the mail and finish the mission."

(If you remember Uplink, it's worth a quick replay, if for no other reason than to compare the in-game headlines with Slashdot's over the past year or two. If you don't, it's short and cheap enough that it's worth playing. Poking around the website, it looks like Introversion's currently working on something that looks an awful lot like a sequel. WANT!)

A Strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Later. Right now, let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

Which reminds me, it's time to see how Subversion is coming along.

Wow. Let the "cyberwar" begin. I don't think the gov't planned for this sort of thing in their games.

But game developers who made Uplink did. (In an ironic note, the game, which came out 10 years ago - was set in 2010.)

We are indeed living in the future.

Ha. It's been said before that computers won't teach you anything. To an extent that's true. It's the software that counts. I stumbled across Uplink once at a Half-Price books. Great game for teaching you the fundamentals of a computer.

You want kids to learn geography? Go war-games on them.

You detect an incoming ICBM from the capital of Iran. Stike first before their's hits you! Launch Retalitory Nuclear Strike against:

• A) New York

• B) Baghdad

• C) Tehran

• D) Berlin

Include cheezy "Three Dee" graphics like every $10 Office Depot game has now days and you have a surefire winner. Better yet, want to teach them math? Get a good ol' USMC Sniper Manual and teach those kids the math behind bullet-drop.

So then don't buy AAA Ports-R-US titles from the Big Boys. There are plenty of good PC publishers that have good games and don't treat their customers like criminals. Introversion is a great independent developer that makes wonderful games including Darwinia, Defcon, and Uplink. Stardock has some good games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations. If it is your thing, The X-Series is a good but complex space flight / trader simulation (think EVE Online but only not an MMO). Lastly, if you don't mind Steam, anything by Valve and many of the older and indie titles in their catalog are pretty good. Just because Ubisoft and EA want to screw over PC gamers doesn't mean that they are the only game (no pun intended) in town.

But without hollywood, would we have had...Uplink?

and the best part is that time actually caught up with the game ;-)

http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/

So you obviously never hacked using the ultimate hacker tool uplink. You should try! there you see how realistic most movies are, unlike most of the hacking tools YOU lamers use...

The gaming market is in desperate need of a proper "kill the civvies" or "nuke the planet" game, it's been far too long..

Like this?

I hope no one tells them about DEFCON. You can kill billions of civilians in that game.

Which you can play, actually: DefCon.

Clearly you have no grasp of economics.

What an excellent way to start a debate.

Obviously my numbers are fabricated,

They are indeed. I will admit though that you have a point. It may well make sense to lower prices.
But what you have to remember is that they are the ones to decide what the prices are. If their prices is what it takes to do business, then that's what they'll charge.

but, as another poster has mentioned, Frictional and Introversion seem to get by ok without DRM with more reasonable prices.

You have totally missed it. Linux Game Publishin publishes games. The companies you name are developers who happen to make the majority of their money on all platformas other than Linux.
Maybe you should listen to what the developers actually think.

It's LGP's own damned fault if they can't price their products appropriately for their market.

If they can't then they will go bankrupt. But if they believe that DRM will help them, it's their right to use it.

Darwinia and Multiwinia (and 'that hacking game' Uplink) were done by Introversion Software, not Ambrosia; Ambrosia just does Introversion's Mac ports.

EV:Nova was all Ambrosia though.

If it's too expensive making COD5 or SF4, people will turn to making games like Spider and Web or Darwinia instead.

Haven't you ever played Uplink? It is in the nature of virus creators to attempt to destroy the Internet.

This. I recently replayed Uplink, and it's pretty amazing (for a game written in 1999) how many things came true.

This is good since I know support Indie games more like; World of Goo, Multiwinia and the Penny Arcade game.

Oddly, this reminds me of the game Uplink - in which the player is hired to do various attacks on computer systems for a fee.

http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/

Well how else do you expect those of us without landlines and acoustic-coupler modems to play global thermonuclear war?

How 'bout this? Even runs on Linux!

In the long run, Everybody Dies.

Haha, true. This is a very fortunate thing. Reading the first paragraph of TFA, I realized that they were describing the same exact thing I felt reading Conservapedia. It's like, funny for 5 minutes, but then it starts getting you depressed, and you start wanting to kill someone, usually the idiot doing it... then you start wanting to kill yourself because you realize that they're all around you.

The thing I keep telling myself is that these are concentrated stories of idiocy, and that the real world isn't composed of nearly the amount of them that I think there is by reading those stories. However, true. That they're going to die someday certainly helps. Here's to Schlafly's eventual death!

So this is why i have trouble getting up in the morning here in georgia.. (the idiocy concentration really IS that bad, in fact it's worse. There's less idiocy at a live american idol performance)

In the long run, Everybody Dies.

Are you sure?

With the advent of bionics, black market organs, and the capacity to grow replacement organs the wealthy, no matter how stupid, cloistered, and bigoted they are, will be able to live forever.

Oh how great the world would have been if hitler could have lived to lead us into the future, right?

In the long run, Everybody Dies.

Haha, true. This is a very fortunate thing. Reading the first paragraph of TFA, I realized that they were describing the same exact thing I felt reading Conservapedia. It's like, funny for 5 minutes, but then it starts getting you depressed, and you start wanting to kill someone, usually the idiot doing it... then you start wanting to kill yourself because you realize that they're all around you.

The thing I keep telling myself is that these are concentrated stories of idiocy, and that the real world isn't composed of nearly the amount of them that I think there is by reading those stories. However, true. That they're going to die someday certainly helps. Here's to Schlafly's eventual death!

In the long run, Everybody Dies.

Hey, maybe you should pitch that to Introversion!.

So have you even seen multiwinia before? And savage2 is very interesting, having first person shooter, third person RPG and rts play.

http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/ :D

Introversion (makers of Darwinia) has done exactly this for their upcoming game, Subversion. It uses auto-generated cities that do a pretty convincing job at modeling procedural cities, with roads and buildings.

Here are some screenshots and info.

It would be my game CD they broke, and there is little I can do about that. Kids break stuff and it's ok, you have to be very boring parent if you haven't noticed that.

This is highly theoretical since I have no CDs, you should only buy CD unencumbered games, such as:

• On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode Two
• World of goo
• Multiwinia
• Galcon RTS Risk

There should be others, but those run on many platforms..