Haxxorz

I was privileged to beta test Demigod well before the game was released. My beta testing was awarded with a pewter model of the Rook (a large castle like creature) and a poster of the same character. My experience with the game has made me believe that charging 50 bucks for a game is indeed reasonable. However, if you are of the opinion that games should be less than that, than you are in luck. Demigod now retails for 40 dollars or less.

Unfortunately, not many users agreed with me when Demigod was initially released; software pirates had hacked the game and ultimately destroyed server load times for the opening weekend. This resulted in terrible reviews and stunned growth for Demigod for the week that followed. The folks at Stardock and GPG made a public announcement confirming that this was the case, and they would attempt to lock the game down with future security updates. After another week of waiting, server lag and drop times had been reduced, and players were regaining faith in the game.

I started with this tid bit of info mostly because I want this review to ignore what I consider to be "an act of God." Stardock/GPG can not be held responsible for something they could not predict, especially when they were trying to benefit the community and those who legally bought the game by not incorporating obnoxious anti-piracy code into the game. It should also be noted that their quick response to the connection issues earns them even higher praise.

Demigods horrible opening weekend aside, the game is simply a "refined DOTA" Demigod's creative models, mated with even a more impressive, though not so well know, back story, results in a true art form. This art form is accentuated by the Supreme Commander - full zoom+/- engine.

There are only a few minor annoyances with Demigod. The largest of all of them is the bugginess of the game. The game seems like it wasn't quite fixed by the time of release, and there were a number of game crashes and exploits. Now that some time has passed, GPG has mostly made up for this in frequent updates.

While GPGs updates may be a plus to holding Demigod together, they have often made false promises on additional content. It is possible that with the bad rap the game got to begin with, GPG has been rushing added content to keep fans hooked; however, they have hurt themselves more by not meeting the deadlines. (1)

(1): We are now over one month overdue on two additional Demigods, and Frogboy (The primary "press" source for the public) has said that it will be yet another two weeks until the new Demigods are released. Our group of gamers have been a bit turned off by GPG/Stardocks slowness to release new content such as these Demigods.

Conclusion:
Demigod is a refreshing, artistic, and creative form of DOTA that narrows the gap between n00bs and pros, but some recent false promises, a lack of content, and some recent buginess has made what would be a perfect game, a good game.

Graphics: (AToR) 9
Engine: 5 (-4 due to bugginess)
Sound: 10
Music: 9
Story/Creativity: 9
Fun: 9
Camera: 9 (-1 for auto rotation upon death)
Overall: 8.6

Boinc is a software application developed by The University of California in Berkeley. The application reports back to servers housed by individual research teams. The servers gather and delegate information to a super-network of home computers. From the data that the project servers collect, researchers can analyze radio waves, fold proteins, and even predict climate changes at little to no cost. The reason for a home user to install Boinc is freindly competition, bragging rights, CPU benchmarking, and most of all, charitable contribution to research which could benefit universities and institutions around the world.

Our group of friends has started a team for the rosetta@home project (protein folding). We are the "h4xx0rz."

We are currently ranked within the top 200 of Rosetta@home teams for RAC (recent average credit) and we are within the top 400 teams for Rosetta@home total credit. Our team is running a wide range of systems from Athlon XPs to quad core Xeons.

Our long term goal is to be ranked within the top 50 out of all United States Rosetta@Home teams for RAC.

We encourage you to join our team and use Boinc for rosetta@home (protein folding) research.

Years ago, Dave (one of our leading team members) found a final prediction. (Final protein match) He was recognized by David Baker:

We are just finalizing a manuscript describing predictions of protein-protein interactions made using rosetta@home during the recent CAPRI international test of protein-protein docking methods. As with our previous papers, we would like to acknowledge participants who produced models which contributed to our final predictions. If you are on the following list, and would like to be acknowledged by your real name rather than your user name, please let us know.

USERID USERNAME SENDEMAIL TEAMID TEAMNAME
5590 SteveK 1 7 BOINC Synergy
112024 Administrator 1
125433 QuickBeam 1 4232 H4xx0rz
3377 devzero 1 5 Free-DC
64398 raptur 1 219 Ohio State University
36366 cyclistgb 1 887 BOINC@Canada
79579 borekv 0 1964 boinc.cz
78679 yopjpeg 1
111834 orion2598 1
147099 MK_I 1 46 Czech National Team

At some point in the future, I will provide some efficiency calculations based on wattage vs performance for the maximum generation of protein folding for the least amount of $