You’re not allowed to laugh at me, it’s against the rules. Ok, so perhaps I’m not really great at computer games or something, but I just got devastated by the Global Criminal Database. It turns out that I got caught a couple times in the Social Security database and, well, because of that I had a minor criminal record. Well, those bastards Uplink wouldn’t hire me into any new jobs so I decide it best to just wipe my record clean. While trying to decrypt some sick Elliptical Cryptography I was nearly traced back through my nodes and decided to just pull the plug on the whole operation and just disconnect.

Not a good idea.

It turns out that the Global Criminal Database doesn’t like it when people try to break their encryption, so they came and seized my Uplink Gateway and ended my career as a hacker.

It could have been worse I guess. In that game I’d only spent about an hour and a half of my time. I’ve picked up something new and I’ll carry it with me. The interesting part is that I was having a lot of fun and feeling a lot of pressure/excitement from doing exceptionally mundane tasks. I mean honestly mundane: most of the time you spend watching bars progress and navigating terminal menus. The game does make things fairly exciting by creating an environment where every action counts and nothing can be undone. Your career and game is on the line with everything you do.

After spending a bit of time with Defcon earlier this year I decided it was the perfect Matthew Broderick in WarGames simulation. Uplink on the other hand, turns out to be the perfect Jonny Lee Miller in Hackers simulator. It’s brilliant in execution, and for being a seemingly unoriginal idea has a fresh and nonpareil feel to it.

Uplink is about seven years old at this point. You may have heard of its developer, a small independent game studio called Introversion, perhaps not (probably so!). Anyways, Steam has an excellent package deal going on right now and since I wanted a copy of Darwinia, and I’ve been interested in Uplink since I purchased Defcon, I picked up the Introversion Anthology for the cheap ass price of $20 and it includes all three of their games. I was a bit disapointed that when I bought it that I kind of ate the cost of Defcon (I was hoping it would turn into a gift much like HL2 did when I bought the Orange Box), but it was still cheaper than buying Darwinia and Uplink separately. Even when the price goes back up to $30 this is still a stupidly good deal.