I can't figure out if this guy is a dog or a cat or what. He walks like a dog or a cat, but he swats at his target like a gorilla, or maybe a cranky ol' bear. Unlike dog, bear, cat, or gorilla he isn't the least bit fuzzy. He's got what looks like spikes sticking out of his shoulders. He has a face like a possum, but it's got a dopey grin to it, like a Border Collie. He's so ugly he's kinda cute. I should point out he's disease ridden and he spills ooze onto the floor. You definitely don't want him around if you have nice furniture or a light colored carpet.

After the jump, read about the Unclean Beast and the multiplayer, which is its own manner of unclean beast.

Demigod uses peer-to-peer connections rather than client-server, which means everyone in the game has to be able to connect to everyone else. This means if one guy's router is screwed up, the whole thing will fall apart. Considering that games of Demigod can support up to 10 players, there's a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. Furthermore, this looks to be one of those games where you have to open ports manually. These days, I figure maybe one in four gamers knows how to do that. Time was a guy who played videogames knew how to set his HIMEM in a config.sys. Not anymore. You darn kids with your console games.

So the first week of Demigod has been hit-or-miss when it comes to playing online. But beyond the connectivity issues, which are likely to be resolved soon enough and eventually an unpleasant memory about the launch of an awesome game, I've got more important but more nitpicky complaints. For instance, you can't tell what settings the host has selected in an online game. I jumped into one game with no way of knowing that favor items - the persistent prizes you earn over the course of playing, which are currently broken anyway - were disabled. Furthermore, he'd set the flag captures to take twice as long. I figured these things out the hard way, in the course of playing. I'd rather know what I'm getting into before I get into it.

You also can see which demigod everyone has chosen, which means a team of clever guys is going to pick demigods based on who they're facing. What kind of online game doesn't allow blind choices?

But under the Skirmish option for online games, you pick your demigod and get dumped into a randomly determined map with a randomly determined victory condition. You go in blind, assured that you won't be facing any funky custom settings. So when I choose the Unclean Beast for a Skirmish game, I'm hoping the victory condition will be domination. I can imagine no better game type than domination for a hard-hitting hit-and-run fellow like the Unclean Beast. In domination games, you rack up a score based on how many flags on the map your team controls. First team to a certain score wins.

No one can run to a flag, swat away defenders, and then run to another flag like the Unclean Beast. He's got all sorts of fancy tricks for spilling toxic ooze, puking poison bile, passing along contagious plague, and infecting victims with diseased claws. He's an all-around nasty fellow. But my favorite Unclean Beast build is the dedicated god-killer, a low maintenance way to play by just running around killing things. All points go to Bestial Wrath, which simply boosts the amount of damage the little guy does for a short period of time, and Diseased Claws, which have a chance of slowing down an afflicted target's speed so it can't run away from the Unclean Beast, who's already plenty fast, and gets faster with the occasional point dropped into his Inner Beast skill. A pair of relatively cheap Boots of Speed make him even faster, which is a great boon during domination matches. And if I can get enough money to afford the Journeyman Treads late in the game, then the Unclean Beast is the equivalent a race car. A puking, oozing, filthy, diseased race car.

Tomorrow: Rook takes Queen, Lord, Oak, Regulus, etc.
(Click here for the previous game diary.)