As I mentioned, this morning I bought Demigod from Impulse.  I started playing a skirmish match against the AI.  I followed Tom Chick's advice of making the speed adjustable, and then reducing the speed to a crawl.  I forgot to set the difficulty to easy, however.  Soon, I grew bored watching everyone moving in slow-motion, so I set the speed back to normal.  I then found that I did, indeed, suck.  I had to get to work, so I stopped the game. 

That evening, I was ready to try again.  First, I downloaded the thing onto my laptop, only to find that it won't run on my laptop (the laptop has one of those piece-of-crap Intel graphics adapters, and if I attempt to run Demigod I get a message saying that it couldn't initialize DirectX or some-such).  Oh well: I went back to my main computer.

Starting an online game was a bit slow.  First, it was trying to find a match.  Several times, it said that it couldn't find a match, but it was still trying.  Then, it said it found a match, but then it took a while to connect me.  Still, it was only a few minutes.

I was playing a 2 vs. 2 match.  I played as the guy the ice-and-fire guy, which is the same guy I tried in the morning.  Yes, he really does say things like "I'm as gold as ice, and willing to sacrifice" and "Ice ice baby".  We played a match where each team tried to get to 20 kills.  My deaths accounted for most of the other team's points.  Yes, I suck.  The match was 47 minutes of humiliation.

This is SUCH an unusual game experience.  On the one hand, it's like Diablo, but getting new spells on the skill tree come really quickly.  Just when I thought I had that figured out, I found a place where I could buy potions.  Ah hah, fast ways to recharge my health and mana!  Then, I found a place where I could upgrade my team -- increasing the strength of defenses, upgrading the minions, and so on!  I began to realize that my character, with his ice spells, was meant to work with someone else, so I tried staying with the other player.  As we were approaching our defeat, the enemies were getting closer to our base, so my guy needed to stay close to defenses. 

I had a great time, and offhand I can't think of another game like this.  I'm looking forward to trying again.  I can imagine how much more I would enjoy this game if I didn't suck.