Nate turned me on to Defcon today, and I’m completely addicted. It’s a game about a global thermonuclear war, and it’s domain name sums up the game quite nicely: everybody dies. While on one hand it’s considerably less violent looking than your average first-person shooter, you aren’t having a good day unless you’ve killed in excess of 50 million people.

It’s a very sterile game - there aren’t any screams of agony, just quiet little “poofs” as millions are incinerated. But the combination of the military-looking vector graphics, the excellent soundtrack, and the occasional nervous cough of the other people in your underground bunker helping you orchestrate the end of days are enough to make this game very compelling.

As I don’t have any kind of modern Windows machine hanging around my house, I set out to get the demo running on my Ubuntu Dapper Drake laptop. It was very easy. After installing Wine, I downloaded the demo, ran the installer, and got the game going (although it was very choppy).

To improve performance, turn off the “smooth lines” feature in the graphics options (apparently this doesn’t work well under Wine). It might also help to run winecfg and set it to emulate a virtual desktop smaller than your screen if you’re having performace problems. The sound is somewhat jumpy, but those changes will get the graphics working pretty well.

I did have a few crashes, so be prepared to be patient with this one, but fortunately a Linux port is planned for the game, due in November. When that comes out, I’m buying it.

Edit: If you are having trouble with ALSA errors when you start, try creating the directory ~/.kde/socket-{YOUR HOSTNAME}, inserting your computer’s hostname, of course.

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