Anti-social

Garou national tomorrow and I really hope that my enthusiasm grows by then. I'm currently sitting here having had a fairly good day. I got my tele fixed today which is good but I'm still not in the best of moods. I'm feeling anti-social and don't want to have to make an effort to have company or be in company. In my current mood socialisiing will be a lot of effort because I'll have to try to act "normal" and happy.

Usually these sorts of moods disappear after a nights sleep so I'm hoping that by tomorrow I'll be feeling a lot happier about things.

So what to do for tonight. The few options that spring to mind are either a) go to bed now b) waste the evening in front of TV c) DVDs.

Oh well, I'll be alright tomorrow I dare say. Otherwise I'll have my laptop at the national and can find a quiet corner. My character has enough things on his mind that I will happily justify him being antisocial.

Oh for a simple life.

Uplink upgrades!!

Well, I am well and truly happy again now. I decided I'd play uplink (http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/) since I hadn't for ages and mentioned it to a friend. I went to find the web page for him and found a patch adding extra functionality to the game as well as other bug fixes. Uplink now has a built in IRC client. How cool is that? :) I can be leet from in game now! :)

They've also added functionality for LAN hacking by the looks of things. I guess this is going to be effectively hacking their gateway server to get access to the LAN and then going through the rest of the system from there. They let you find out about all these things in game though so I know very little until I play it lots.. On the other hand I am quite experienced and I reckon I should be ready for a bank job after about 3 hours of play at which point I can upgrade to the hottest computer system on the block (and buy IRC HUD component if that needs to be purchased). Then I can hack anything... :) (though you could argue that if I can hack banks then I can hack anything... :)

Anyway, game beckons. *bounce*

Oh, and to clarify http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/ where there is a downloadable demo. The game (and demo) run on both windows and linux (no experience with the linux version though). I highly reccomend it to everybody. If you like the demo then it only costs 20 quid to upgrade. And I think I might even get free stuff if I attract someby else to buy it so do tell me if you do. :)

http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/ - I love it so much that you get the url three times. :)

Uplink - a quick review

It was pointed out to me that I didn't explain what uplink was before so here is a quick description and a semi-reveiw. Not much of one since i'm going to run it off quickly to get back to the game. :)

Uplink is a game about computer hacking. You play the part of a hacker working unofficially for the uplink corporation. You take on freelance jobs that range from copying some data files from servers to ruining people's lives by altering criminal records and putting out a warrant for their arrest. There are also "plot" missions that are a bit more special but I'll leave details of that to the game.

The style of hacking is a very hollywood one. The first thing you do when hacking a system is to go to your world map to plot a route to your target. Sure, you could connect directly but that is so easy to track so you go to your world map and bounce off of a few other systems to make the trracing harder. Once there you point your password cracker at their system. Sometimes you need voice analysis and another handy piece of software does that. It can mostly be done from the nice GUI but occasionally you want to drop into a systems console where you can much more easily do a cd sys; delete *; shutdown and watch it kick you out as it reboots and then fail to restart.

THe game offers you news articles of the various computer crimes going on and you can watch out for your little escapades. Occasionally though if you aren't careful the feds catch you. Early on they might just fine you but in the later stages its game over to be caught. You can prevent this by being careful in your missions but also by having security on your gateway computer (self destruct mechanism in the event of tampering anybody?).

The game is very fun to play in my experience. You can race against the clock as you watch your seconds ticking down as you curse the speed of your link whilst trying to steal computer files. THe same mission can get a bit samey but fortunately as you do more missions your uplink rating goes up and people becoe willing to hire you for tougher jobs. Also you always have the option of a few freelance missions. Working out how to hack a bank and getting away with it is both very rewarding and very satisfying. I'm sure similar things can be done with the stock system but I only found that about an hour ago. :)

The plot missions are very fun initially but the later ones were an absolute nightmare. This may be because I went about it wrong (logically things I did were, in hindsight, ludicrously stupid) or it might be very hard. However unlike some games the plot is not the central fun stuff of the game.

New functionality has recently been added for LAN hacking which looks like it hugely increases the stuff to do in the game. As far as I can tell LANs have about a dozen types of subsystems including mail servers, authenticaton servers, routes, switches, terminals, etc. I've not gone up against one yet (as mentioned in other post) so I don't know how much they add to the enjoyment of the game.

The demo is downloadable which gives you access to the very easy levels of missions. The full game costs 20 pounds and is worth it in my opinion on the other hand your mileage may vary.

I'd give it full marks but that is a bit cliched so I'm going to go for the other cliche of giving it 9.5/10. :)