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I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.

It's called Uplink , and a demo can be downloaded from here.

It's even made it to Steam ..

Duhh.. these guys weren't amateurs. They wouldn't have been communicating directly with the compromised hosts. There'd be like three or more hops of compromised boxes between them and the Pentagon.

True, but doesn't it seem weird that the world is becoming more and more like the game of Uplink? :)

called Uplink *Spoiler alert* at the end of your regular hacker job you find out what the mega-corporation is doing and have to stop their ultimate bad worm with one that patches systems. It was a pretty fun game.

I hear the Uplink corporation is hiring...

For a game written in 2001, certain elements of the storyline (shadowy corporation acting as an anonymous market between criminals and customers, purchase of cracking tools online, shadowier corporations hijacking competitors' networks for even shadowier goals) bear an uncanny resemblance to current events.

Copy another company's proprietary database.
Payment for this job is 7800 credits.
This job has been assigned an Uplink difficulty rating of 4.
You will need 175 megaquads of storage to complete this mission.

The Uplink corporation is hiring.

Have him play Uplink. Remind him that the game was written in 2001. Ask him to compare and contrast the elements of gameplay with reality. The game is a great layman's intro to the concepts of onion routing and darknets, and the storyline involves something that's eerily similar to the Storm botnet.

Plot Idea 4: 2010. You're a hacker for hire, working with others under the umbrella of the Uplink Corporation. Breaking into other companies' networks, and stealing data is how you pay your bills. A few weeks after you get started, you hear rumors that Andromeda Research Corporation is working on a big project. A really big project. A project so big that when information about it starts to leak out, people start dying. If you're clever enough to figure out what ARC's up to... do you try to join them or try to fight them?

Most fun-per-buck I had on any software I bought in 2002. Great game, slick interface, fantastic soundtrack, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The guys that wrote that game were only 10 years ahead of their time.

Sim City 3000 (happy penguin pay)
Tremulous: http://tremulous.net/ (Repositories free)
Legends: http://legendsthegame.net/ (download free)
Uplink: http://www.uplink.co.uk/
Darwinia: http://www.darwinia.co.uk/
Defcon: http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/

Don't assume they're all rubbish till you've actually played them. Preferably on Linux. (Except Sim City. Thats rubbish.)

Nope, just contact the Uplink Corporation, and be sure to break the chain of logs that connect your gateway's activity to the target machines before the passive trace gets you. (It helps to have root on at least one of the chain of proxies you're bouncing your connection through.)

$50K is a pretty good payout for a mission.

No, not at all. Uplink was the most fun I've had in ages, and the more I read headlines about "Database breached: 300,000 customer records leaked" or "University computer hacked", I think of that game. And what is the ongoing battle between spam botnets and spam filters but a thinly-disguised play on Revelation vs. Faith?

Am I the only one reminded of a very good independant british computer game?

Of course, you'd have to bounce your connexion through InterNIC, hack into the International Academic Database, disable the proxy and clear your logs afterwards... :D

TeraQuads, as in Uplink style TeraQuads? One of the most fun non-graphically intensive games of the past 5 years.

..if you spend a little time playing Uplink.

The guy's somewhat right- the projects that he lists are quite impressive in that they promise a hell of a lot. However, in my experience with European developers, even if they have cool features or awesome graphics, their game will smack you down somewhere.

X3 Reunion, for example, suffers from high system requirements and it lacks the features that would make its innovative features great (e.g., you can't relocate or dismantle a station after you've built it). Moreover, the game universe makes freeform play almost too overwhelming to enjoy.

Neocron was plagued by seemingly endless bugs that ruined any coolness that any new patch would add.

I will say that some of the coolest games I've played have come out of Europe (e.g., Uplink), but they've had their fair share of duds (e.g., Iron Storm).

I see this every time I dare to glimpse at the gaming press. The absolute worst of the worst are the TV shows, like GamerTV, Gamesville, and that old one with the woman with the weird hair. Here's the recipe: too many futuristic "swooshing" animations, episodes repeated ad-infinitum no matter how old they become, review after review of Yet Another 3D Platformer 4, and a clichéd, useless "We give it... 3 out of 5!"-type section.

You will almost never see a game like N, or Uplink reviewed, because they aren't backed by the big cartels like EA, whose latest player name update to FIFA will doubtlessly turn out to be a "worthy addition to this legendary series".

Neverwinternights, Simcity 3000, Myth II, Robin Hood.

Ofcourse tons of free puzzle board, card and arcade-like games, which I don't care for too much.

This one is nice : http://www.uplink.co.uk/ You get too play a hacker.

Introversion claim to be "the last of the bedroom programmers".

They've released two games so far, Uplink & Darwinia. I bought 'em both, and thought they were great - definitely not the sort of games a company like EA would release.

For the unitiated, Uplink is a "hacking" game, intended to replicate the experiences of hacking you see in the movies. It's also littered with references to movies, and other computer games (I particularly liek the Frontier-style bulletin boards!) Darwinia is a little harder to classify. It's sort of part RTS, part God Game, tied together with a stylishly done 80's-video-game feel. (That's a rubbish explanation - you'll have to try the demo to see what I mean.)

At the end of the day, I suppose it all comes down to acceptable risks. EA have got so used to raking it in from their annual updates to the NFL, NBA, NHL, FIFA (etc. etc.) series that they can't see the benefit in trying out anything that isn't a sure-fire-money-spinner (read, anything that isn't highly derivative of something they've done before). For the little guys to get noticed, I suppose they have to come up with something new/unconventional.

I know which I'd rather play...

Either its a sarcastic stabb at linux, or an attempt at a joke, but either way I'll throw in my two pence.

There are plenty of games avalable for Linux, including great titles such as Uplink (http://www.uplink.co.uk/), Darwinia (http://www.darwinia.co.uk/), and a many others.

You just need to look about more often :)

NeoThermic

You did buy a copy of Darwinia, didn't you? How about Uplink?

Schwab

Uplink a fantastic small game by introversion and ported to the mac by ambriosia (whom I adore) - yes, it's not a PRETTY graphics based game, and it can be a bit cheesy at times, but VERY immersive, and puts you in a fundamentally different role than a shot-em-up or make-my-army-win kind of game. Darwinia isn't half bad either.

I would like to see a game with a dynamic system based on all kinds of sociology and psychology (basically culture in general) including religion. The probem with a lot of the games that involve culture is that the 'cultures' in them are preset and unchangable.

A game where you get to mold the details of a culture and see how it develops and how it interacts with other cultures would be fantatic.

A primitive version of what I am thinking of would be something like NationStates. With that, you just set up a style of government, and you deal with issues that it sends you every day. I am thinking more along the lines of something realtime where you not only delt with issues that it gives you, but also initiated events yourself, actively influencing the culture.

The culture would have various subcultures in it: religious, intellectual, militant, pacifist, apathetic, civil-rights-loving, and others groups of that nature. There would also be a counterculture element, if the culture moves in one direction, a certain low percentage of the population would move in the opposite direction.

In the real world, naturally an individual person can belong to more than one subculture. But of course in the game we are looking at the cumulative effect, not at individuals.

Some subcultures might work well together and a person could easily be a member of both, like intellectual and freedom-loving, while others are almost entirely incompatible in the same person, like pacifist and militant. Subcultures like that would even be aligned against each other.

There would be two numbers attached to each of the subcultures, one would be the number of people in that subculture (the sum of all of these could very well be greater than the population, since an individual can be in more than one subculture). The other would be how strong that subculture is, perhaps what percentage of the 'Ideosphere' (for lack of a better term) the ideals of that culture take up. For instance, if two subcultures have approximatly the same number of people, but the people in one are more vehement in their beliefs, then that subculture would have a higher percentage.

The player would decide what kind of government the country would have: democratic, totalitatian, theocratic, etc. I am thinking that a good way to do this is instead of selecting a pre-defined type of government, all the various types could be broken down into thier defining elements, and the player could modify those elements at will, perhaps even mid-game.

The user would deal with issues that are raised (or that he raises himself) involving economy, education, censorship, foreign policy, how the government works, civil rights, the government's attitude toward those rights, and other things of that nature. How the player deals with the issues would define how the culture changes and develops.

I think that if there are going to be wars in the game, then they should be fought automatically. The player would be more concerned with the affect of the war on the populous. Although the player would be able to divert resources to the military; this would also have an affect on the culture, as would where the resources came from.

I am not sure what kind of interface the game would have. If nothing graphically representational can be though of, it might just be a series of menus, charts, and dialog boxes, kind of like the game Uplink

Something like that would definitely be worth my money.

Don't forget Darwinia and Uplink as decent indy games.

Ever played Uplink?

Am I the only one who thinks this is a profoundly stupid idea? I don't want to reboot my computer to play a round of Quake or UT; I want to load it up, play for twenty or thirty minutes to clear my head a bit, and hop back into work without missing more than a couple beats. I'm not an absolute, die-hard, use-a-CRT-instead-of-an-LCD-to-save-a-millisecond gaming nut; I just want to braindump once in a while. Between saving all my work, bookmarking where I am in things, shutting down, booting back up, shutting down again, booting back up into my actual OS, and starting all my applications again, I've added about half back onto my playtime, plus I've broken all my thought-chains. Right now, it's easy - I go through my start menu and open up UT on top of everything I'm doing; I close it when I'm done, and *poof* I'm exactly where I was before beginning the mess. Works really well for consoles, where you really aren't doing anything but playing around, and hardcore gamers, who sit down and focus entirely on the game anyway. I can even see it working really well if the medium were integrated with the game - it would work very well with an Uplink-style immersive game. But what about the rest of us, who just want a quick diversion sometimes?

No, there really isn't. This isn't even a case of RTFA, just RTFDescription - indie just means self-published. The product is games that aren't swayed by the same influences as commercial ones, which allows them to be experimental and to address niches that mainstream games ignore (see: Uplink). The purpose of this organization is to provide indie developers with resources that will help them create quality games - it doesn't strip them of their creative independence.

Jagged Alliance II --- Strategy? Simulation? You have management (limited cash, generate more cash by liberating mines, manage weapons and ammo, supply train, your mercenaries, etc). You have some strategy (which area to attack next?). You have puzzles (how to build a barrel attachment?) But in the main part you have round based tactical combat.

Or what about breakout & co? Tron? Snake? Space Invaders? Loderunner, Pitfall Harry, ... (Jump and Run)?

Or how about Uplink?

I think I smell an Uplink player here. In reality, you can't spoof, ANI will show your originating phone number and that number gets bounced around with each successive call. It is true, however, that starting a few conference calls, chaining them together, then calling Sears, explaining that you're new in Automotive and you need the operator, getting a dialtone, and continuing the chain of calls can slow things down a little.