You Don’t Look at the HUD When You’re Playing With The Mechanics
I’ve been playing a lot of Uplink recently. It’s a very confusing, brilliant, terrifying game. For those of you not in the know, Uplink is a game were you play a rookie hacker on your way to the big money. You start out taking jobs to steal files from mostly unprotected servers, and work yourself up to hacking bank accounts and taking over government databases. The most brilliant thing about it, though, is that it creates all the staples of a great game; tension, excitement, strategy and a compelling narrative without ever giving you more than a few task bars, a world map and some text. It’s a triumph of mechanics over aesthetics, and it’s the antithesis to games like Crysis and Call of Duty.