Demigod was released last week to large amounts of terminal stupidity on the Internet. This was not unexpected, as Demigod borrows somewhat from the Warcraft III modification Defence of the Ancients (DoTA). Despite owning Warcraft III I never felt the need to try DoTA because of the cult of idiocy that surrounded the community. One forum I frequent banned anyone who posted a DoTA thread because it would usually devolve into the worst kind of crap flinging that we usually attribute to the lower primates and No Mutants Allowed.

So I had resolved to give Demigod a miss and ignored any press about it in favor of looking at those Civony.com banner ads with the scantily dressed young ladies plastered all over them. However this morning I decided that I would give it a go. Sure, it cost a bit of money but like a lot of people, I put aside some money for my hobby and don't froth at the mouth like rabid wolverine when developers ask me to actually pay for the game they spent a few years developing.

I bought the game through Impulse because going to a computer game store here in Australia and expecting to be able to actually buy something confuses the retail workers. I load the game up and immediately notice there's no tutorial. I decide to jump into a game anyway and try to figure out what's going on. No dice, there's a lot of things to consider and I don't know what they all do. I finally found the PDF of the game manual in the /bin/ directory of the game install and after a quick flick through the first dozen pages of the manual I was on my way. Not the best way to get started but I found it in the end so I'm not too fussed.

Guess what. Without knowing anything about DoTA, Demigod or what this game was supposed to be about I actually found it fun, to the point where I lost track of time for an hour or two. You'd think from the amount of hand wringing on the internet that the game loads up and just flips you off for an hour before crashing to the desktop.

Which brings me, in a round about way, to my point. People who like computer games are the worst people to comment about computer games. Most of them have their expectations set so ridiculously high that they're in orbit around their own inflated head. Ignore them at all costs.

Fair enough that we should lambast a developer who releases a bad game. I've done it in the past and I'll probably do it again, however Demigod isn't a bad game, it's not even close.