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From: JAB <noway@nochance.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Defcon: Most horrifying game ever?
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2025 19:11:52 +0000
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Well something popped up on my feed about this recently and I thought 
yeh it's horrific. So the basic game, almost twenty years old now, is 
all out nuclear war but what takes it above that, at least for me, is 
the way it's presented. It is a strategy game but everything is quite 
abstract and minimalist from its Wargames (the film) graphics, to its 
haunting sounds and basic units of fighters, bombers, aircraft carriers, 
destroyers, battleships, radar units, SAM sites, airfields and of course 
ICBM silos which can also serve to shot down incoming nukes. No 
research, no resource gathering just you all get the same units to 
deploy as you wish.

You start at Defcon five and as the timer ticks down that level is 
raised meaning you get to place more units and eventually start actual 
conventional combat. Once it reaches Defcon one all hell breaks lose and 
it's a question of who is going to launch nukes first with an 
accompanying siren noise. See a city hit and all that's shown is a white 
flash and in big letters the death toll in millions. This happens over 
and over again until the world is filled with the glow of nuclear 
strikes and the timer reaches zero. The winner is then announced based 
on casualties for and against.

The part I found really horrific is that it's only after you've played 
several games that it dawns on you that you're detached from what you're 
doing (you cannot die) and are taking enjoyment in counting the death 
toll you're causing while not overly caring of the death toll in your 
continent. The finally part is when the results are shown as raw figures.

As the game says everybody dies. You don't win, instead you just don't 
do as badly as everyone else.