After eight day of talking about the specific demigods, which is pretty much the same thing as talking about the game itself, there's still an elephant in the room. And that elephant belongs in any complete discussion of Demigod as a game.

It's a doozy. Read about it after the jump.

Those of us who play games on the PC will get our hearts broken in ways that people who play games on console systems will never know. I've spent the last few days dealing with the interminable process of patching Company of Heroes, trying to set up Call of Duty: World at War on a LAN, nVidia's recent drivers dropping support for AGP videocards, and Demigod's inchoate and unstable multiplayer system. Any one of these would drive a normal man to a life of Halo 3 and Super Mario Kart.

But the rewards are often proportionate to the hassles. It takes a game as good as Demigod to not collapse entirely under all the hassle. I probably spent a total of five hours arranging an eight-player game for an article that culminated in a confused and ugly hour-and-a-half of hung, dropped, unreciprocated, and unreliable connections. We never even got into the gameplay and, needless to say, the article isn't going to be written. I won't say that Demigod is broken, because I've been able to enjoy it as a multiplayer game and as a single player game. But it too often does not do what the developers intend it to do.

Reviews of Demigod should concern themselves primarily with the game and not the launch. And now that the launch has passed and the game is well into its second week, the problems that remain can no longer be attributed to the launch. They are, pure and simple, egregious missteps on the part of developer Gas Powered Games and publisher Stardock. The culprit seems to be a combination of the peer-to-peer system created by Gas Powered Games and the front-end implemented by Stardock. Right now, Stardock is in the process of trying to circumvent the peer-to-peer system with a bit of server trickery that will hopefully go live next week.

But part of what this means is that other problems are going unfixed and unacknowledged. Demigod features a wonderful favor metagame based on spending points earned ingame to buy special persistent items. It doesn't work correctly. There are some serious interface issues that need to be addressed; in fact, they should have been addressed given the game's extended beta period. Demigod needs a tutorial and better documentation for new players. But in the apparently scramble to shore up the crumbling multiplayer connectivity, these things are swept under the carpet.

So the final word on Demigod -- and by "final", I mean the thing I'm going to have to write that for two weeks I hoped I wasn't going to have to write -- is that it's a brilliant game let down by the people who made it and the people who published it.

(Click here for the previous game diary.)