UplinkHackerElite

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Has anyone else come across this game? Previously known as just Uplink but now being released in the US as Uplink: Hacker Elite. More details (including demo) can be found on the [Introversion] site. Introversion also wrote DefCon, a game which does for the world what Uplink does for the internet (wrecks it).

I've just been playing a bit of the demo and thoroughly enjoying myself hacking into various systems :) The interface is wonderful.

Demo available in both Win and Linux flavours, which should count in its favour around here :)

The interface looks pretty - but it is soon apparent that it's just there to get in the way. The world map is particularly unusable, and bits of interface don't quite behave in standard ways (some programs close themselves after use, others hang around) and some updates don't work quite properly. (bring up the proxy detector then bring up an email - the active proxy icons stay up)

But yes - it's a wonderful little game. And you can buy it on the highstreet, or order it (which I did) - on the highstreet, the little 'electronic games' shop inside the smaller of the two malls (the one with the sega centre in) stocks it. (Southampton) --Vitenka

: Odd, all the games shops in Southampton I tried today denied the existance of such a game, let alone having one in stock. Ah well, having played a little more, I'm not sure how interested I am. I must be missing something but I seem to have a 50-75% trace on me by the time I've cracked the password :( - Kazuhiko

But be warned - the plot is nice, but the actual gameplay is somewhat repetitive and quite easy. The game is quite moddable though. --Vitenka

: Nope - none of those. It's the one that connects the old town gate to East road. The one with all the scallies in it. The shop is on the upper floor, and near the sega end. The one that just has racks of second hand console games. There's a bargain bin near the door, on your left, and there's a copy in there. And yeah - you have to bounce your link through 20 or so nodes, and they delay the trace more if you have root on those nodes (and even more if they are very secure systems) - and you begin to really hate the interface when you have 50+ nodes on your map. And there's the problem - as long as you remember to wipe logs properly, all you have to do to complete any mission is use the correct software and bounce through sufficient other nodes. the fun part of the game is figuring out how to play though, so I'll stop giving you hints. --Vitenka
: MoonShadow hasn't played it yet, but the guy that wrote it - Chris Delay - used to work at Frontier until not too long ago; in fact, it has just been confirmed to me that certain ToothyWikizens will be meeting him this Sunday evening at a non-ToothyWikizen's social gathering in Cambridge.

How did it go? Did he/you/someone mention the game at all? - Kazuhiko

: SunKitten and I didn't end up meeting him. I had a good 19x19 game of Go against Nagi, though ^-^ Did anyone else meet him? - MoonShadow

Hmm. I suspect I was at the gathering in question, but I don't think I met anyone called Chris. Oh, I did, actually - he beat me at SuperMonkeyBall? Gliding. Lots. Whether that's the same Chris or not is anyone's guess :) --AlexChurchill

This game is really not good for my mental health... They've given me a game that represents all of the techy aspects of my job, only you have to get away with doing as much damage to the client's *cough* Sorry, other companies' web servers instead of trying to patch them up afterwards. This, at the moment, equates roughly to 'bliss'.

It wasn't particularly helped by the fact that I played for several hours and then had to connect to a server at work to reboot it, only the external connection had gone down so I had to connect to a different server and then use that one to connect to the problem server before being able to reboot it... It was all I could do to stop myself from looking for the access logs to delete the evidence of my actions...

Oh, and did I mention breaking into insane giggles while typing the 'shutdown' command after erasing the system files from a mega-corporations central server? (that one was in-game... at least I think it was...)

Comments on the patch (mainly for Vitenka if he hasn't played it for a while, in case some of this is new). Being able to play in 800*600 is a good thing as it makes the world-map fractionally more usable (it's still a mess though). Usable scroll bars are also good :) They have also introduced LANs, which I believe are supposed to be significantly harder to access than any of the other systems. I don't know since the LAN tools are all extremely expensive. The introduction of a IRC client ingame sounds like a lot of fun, but I haven't tried buying that one yet.

My only problem with it so far is the speed of 'death'. I was happily hacking along when, abruptly, everything went black and I hit a game over screen. Admittedly, I had just transferred 620,000 credits from a bank account to my own but I was expecting a couple of minutes to clean up my tracks ^^;; Plus, I had the 'remote' unit which said I could not be caught :(

 --Kazuhiko

: The remote is just flavour text. I've been caught by that too. The larger screen is better, but still not good enough. LANs are ufn, but still pretty mechanical. The bank probably traced you by the money rather than by the hack attempts. It may well have been from a previous action that they got you. (Or maybe oyu'd left time acceleration on) - you do normally get a couple of minutes - but make sure that they can't trace the cash! The IRC client is pointless. The game runs in a window, and their in game irc is just annoying. Nice touch. There is a litestep uplink theme, if you want to go whole hog though. --Vitenka

CategoryComputerGames