Global Thermonuclear War

Joystiq reports that, from the makers of Darwinia and Uplink comes DEFCON, what appears to be a global nuclear war strategy title. Looks positively Wargames-tastic. From the EvilAvatar post they reference: "The new game, titled DEFCON, is a multiplayer strategy which pitches two players against one another in a game of Global Thermonuclear War. In DEFCON a player must manage their launch silos in an attempt to defend their major cities against nuclear attack while simultaneously launching their own attacks against the other player."

Comments

Useless link, heres the real one.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

That link took me to a blog with one comment and no info on it. At best it might have had some info that one of my adblock rules scrapped, but I don't care, I wan't real info, not some 16 year olds opinion on it. For those who are wondering, the real link is Here (http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/)

It would be more interesting if...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

It would be more interesting if Slashdot actually linked to a Blog article that contained some sort of content. Instead, you link to an empty blog article, which means I need to hunt around on the site to find all articles by This guy and scroll down his list of recent entries....

Sorta silly, dontcha think? Trying to generate more pageviews or something?

Re:Uplink

[GigsVT]

In any case since the summary sucked, the anonymous "maker" is Introversion software.

They don't really have much information about DEFCON up yet. But do check out Uplink if DEFCON sounds interesting to you.. It's a cheap game and it works equally well on Linux as Windows.

Strange game...

[Stormwatch]

The only winning move is not to play.

Wikipedia has actual info + screens

[isaac]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defcon_(computer_game )

Damn, why was this article even posted?

-Isaac

Does anyone remember that old DOS game?

[bergeron76]

I had a DOS game back in the day that allowed you to simulate a nuclear blast in any given city and see the effect of both the blast and the resultant fallout.

I can't remember the name of the game though, but it was fascinating (even back when I was 12). Anyone know what that game was called? I can't seem to find it on the web anywhere.

I found it on a 5.25" floppy in my Dad's briefcase, back when he worked for the government when we lived in Arlington, Virginia (or was it the hills of West Virginia?)... Anyway, I'd love to know what the name of that game was (Dad always called it "Simulation"; but I think that's a silly name for a video game, so I never believed him).

Thanks for any help!

Re:Does anyone remember that old DOS game?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

No, I think that people are under the conception that the 100,000 1-Megaton nukes shared between the former-USSR and the US could take out wide swaths of the world.

You are probably too young to remember much about the Cold War, but I grew up in the Reagan Era, and yeah we did have incredibly paranoid discussions like "Well the Soviets are targetting the nearby airforce base but luckily we are greater then 11.7 Kilometers from ground zero." ... Seriously!

Re:Does anyone remember that old DOS game?

[GigsVT]

I remember the Cold War. A bunch of the video games and movies in the 80s were about it in one way or another.

I don't know what megaton bombs you are talking about, we have very little that is over 1MT, and we don't have 100,000 of anything, even if you count individual warheads and not missiles.

From the Nuclear Weapons FAQ

The only thing we have potentially over 1MT is the B83 Bomb, but it's "dial a yield", it can be set.

Everything else we have is under 500kt, many around 150kt We have 8300 warheads not in storage (deployed), about about 1000 more in storage.

Russia has less than 1000 warheads. They are also under 1MT each.

That's no where near 100,000 1MT bombs. This is exactly the kind of myth that should be dispelled.

The entire world stockpile is something more like 10,000 warheads, with the average running about 300kt.

If all were detonated, with absolutely no overlap, it would take out about 325,000 square kilometers. That's about the same land area of the state of New Mexico.

Not huge parts of the world. It could deal a big blow to many major cities though.

Fallout and "nuclear winter" possibilities are not a big thing. Fallout decays quickly to safe levels (measured in weeks), and low yield bombs do not loft dust into the stratosphere, and thus can't create a nuclear winter scenario, as the dust is rained out quickly.