Killing Minutes: Tower Defense Redux

Probably you have many ways to kill time on the internet. Too many, but Flash-based tower defense games are always good for a few compulsive hours if that's your bag. A while ago I wrote about Cursed Treasure and essentially gave it GOTY status among its overpopulated field. Luckily enough, the sequel was recently released, and it's great. How great? So great. I'd say it's a fitting sequel in terms of quality and entertainment value. It's free, after all, so it's absolutely a great value. Allow me review it, so you don't have to formulate an opinion yourself...

Presentation: Top quality. You can tell that a great amount of work went into everything: the UI is reworked and very appealing, the enemies look top notch, and the spell effects are 'cool fantasy game' level or better. Essentially it is a flat, 2D kind of thing, but it has depth and obvious artistry. The story is a humorous version of barely-there, but all you need to know is that you got to keep all the dudes away from your gems by any means necessary. The sounds are well-done, though too many Orc bunkers will short out attack sounds and the music is repetitive as you'd expect.

The spells and skills have been reworked and so have the towers you will use to destroy the gem-seekers - mostly predictable but with good variety. The design is all-round excellent, but the power-ups that randomly drop can quickly become a large pile of clutter in your culling zones, which can make it hard to pick up that coin you need or cast the right scroll. Mostly you can spare yourself this effect by tower-placement and actually picking things up.

Difficulty: The difficulty curve is a bit steeper than in the first Cursed Treasure, and levels off a bit more quickly when your skill investments start to pay off. If you've beaten the first game (and I'd recommend starting with it and the level pack, because they are great) this game will not present too much of a challenge, but there are a few devious levels. There's no need to get overconfident unless you are a TD-mastermind, but on the other hand a few old maps (see above) are reused – the difficulty in beating them the first time is obviously high, but if you 100%ed the old game they'll be relatively easy this time around. Well, to those I would say: enjoy the tricks this game has up its sleeve – there are a couple of truly fiendish levels that will test you. Ultimately I would hazard the opinion that this game is a little easier, overall, than the first. Not that it matters greatly, as you'll be well into the game by the time you outwit or overpower it.

Entertainment Value: Even if you hate badges, the game has replayability built in in the form of night-time maps which provide extra challenge and more XP, because you've got to be and XP addict by now. Sweet, sweet, honey-sweet EXP. Some maps will take a few replays to ace, and you'll want to ace all of them for XP. If you sign up for an Armor Games account there are 'quests' you can do which are like bonus achievements with real-world numbers attached – great if you want to 1% this game and prove to yourself how hardcore and elite you are.

Conclusion: It's great, it's free, it's well-made (maybe a little system intensive) and it's an absolute time-killer. If you doubt me, just go and see for yourself. It's early in the year to award this game GOTY (Flash, free, internet) status, but the challengers will really have to step up their game to compete. It's the best challenger for the title thus far. Iriysoft has outdone themselves in many ways on this title, and deserve a round of accolades (or drinks).

Redaction!

Look the word up if you're puzzled, I've no time to spare because it's Mother's Day. I'd like to post up some quick last minute gift ideas but I have to redact some of my claims in the previous post. You see, the Cursed Treasure Level Pack is actually easier than the original game. I've gotten as close to 100%ing the game as I feel is necessary, and though it can be a bit tricky, it is rather quite a breeze of a game if you just want to finish all the action-packed levels. I don't know why they didn't just release a map editor so fans of the game could release their own map packs. That would tide us over until they either improve the game in a sequel or ruin it entirely in a sequel.

Now Mother's Day is a tough gifting occasion. Almost everything people tell you to buy your mother she does not want (unless she is frivolous, but then again she did birth you), will find useless, or will pretend to like to spare your massively fragile, self-involved ego.

Flowers? This is spring-time. Flowers grow anywhere, so the only way to make a legitimate gift of flowers is to pick them wild over a large amount of territory. I don't mean strip all the flowers down and show up with a smelly, insect-infested bushel of decorative weeds: I mean one of each kind of flower. If you buy flowers on this day I don't want to talk to you and I don't want to hear your mother's sorrowful tale about her kid that drives a BMW but can't even express gratitude or reverence or honour. What's this day about, again?

Chocolate? You're the worst kind of person. All I'll say is it better be so pure your mom gets a buzz off it.

Cars? Overstatement. Also: husbands, this is not a day to worship your wives, dumb fucks. This is the day you are technically allowed to  become a bachelor son again, since your wife becomes 50% mother to her children and 50% child of her mother. Understand that? You buy a wife a car; you buy your mother something worth a goddamn and not so showy. There's a recession on!

Books? This is tricky, because your mother might come from a time or culture where illiteracy was not shameful or hidden. That best-seller might open a can of worms you can't deal with – or it'll bring your family together in a surprising way. When in doubt, DH Lawrence is the official patron saint of Mother's Day, and if you're a real jack ass and buying a poetry book, you better make sure the poetess you blindly purchase is up to snuff. Because your mother will either spare your feelings or laugh at you, but she will never read more than two or three verses.

I'd recommend drugs, but nobody wants to trip with their parents. I'd recommend booze, but come on. I'd recommend watching Psycho with your mother but that's a bit overdone (still recommend it actually). Comedy DVDs are probably a safe bet. Tobacco is not. You can't repay a life debt easily, but if you have a good idea I'd say go with it. The best gifts on a day like this are related to keeping the day simple, happy, and uncomplicated by consumerist posturing, unintentional feminist grandstanding, or family blow-outs. Have fun! 

2010 Retrospective, pt.5: Winner among the Free Games

I've spent more money on computer games than I should have. I've probably spent more money on just about every other thing, but unlike food or drink, computer games can be ridiculously disappointing. This is because most developers don't really care, because everyone who likes a game will buy the sequel to that game, just like with the movies. Look at Doom 3, or the movie they made about the Doom series. Nobody understands gamers, but everyone is looking to make fast money on the computer game upsurge. Since girls started fearlessly admitting that they do in fact exist in online gaming worlds, even stone-cold businesswomen with snake eyes have been getting in on the feast, and you better believe their parasitic-yuppie husbands do the coding.

So the analogy that works best is that the computer gaming industry is more or less like Hollywood, if Hollywood forced you to buy special equipment to watch their movies optimally, and if they left all the bad scenes and failed sequences in. Greed, illusion, nonsense et cetera. Computer game critics are regularly paid off to provide beaming reviews, and the ones who aren't tame, if they exist, are held under the radar by the invisible hand*. No wonder gaming took so long to catch on.

Now if games you pay to play are like Hollywood, free online games must be like TV commercials, right? Surprisingly, there are free games available on websites that do not cost money and are probably more enjoyable than many retail games.

Free games have always existed. Up until 1648, if you had the right friends and lived in a city, chances were you could play chess mostly for free. Then card games exploded. Then board games, and finally table-top pencil and paper games emerging around the same time as the first video games. Time went on.

To be honest I can't be bothered with the history of games, and I made it all up within reasonable parameters. At some point between 1995 and the wide-spread adoption of the internet, shareware games went extinct. The free-online game was in its larval stage in those years, but in the last 16 years it has grown up with all kinds of misspelling, uninspired sequels, and borderline plagiarism.

I was introduced to the tower-defence-genre game Cursed Treasure in the closing days of 2010, and I finished it before 2011 with time to spare. It is hosted on www.towerdefence.net, along with any other TD-variant you could wish to find. I was addicted pretty much instantly, because tower defence games are addictive, especially if they are designed well.

Despite the goofy music and sound effects (which I now have a sort of Pavlovian approval of) the game epitomized what is best about free gaming. It is relatively simple, it is clean and well designed, and it is fun to play. Lots of online flash games that you can play at no charge can do one or the other of the above things, but almost none of them are presented so well that they actually redeem the format.

The gameplay is engaging and deceptively simple, and the addition of skill-trees and XP are not original, but nowhere else have they worked so well. Your towers shoot monsters, dead monsters drop gold, your towers level up, and then you upgrade them so they can kill more monsters. You also have mana that you use for various helpful spells. At the end of the round, you may level up and assign skill points to make your towers and spells better. It sounds easy. To the right person anything seems easy. This is why you must play the game.

Several of the levels, and especially the second-last one, are devilishly hard to beat and require tactical thinking and good use of material. Unfortunately, the game is not completist friendly – perfect scores on all maps require grinding and luck, but the possibility exists for those who want to try. There are only two or three levels which are really hard to complete perfectly, though, and most people don't care about that. So, audience of one bot, spread the word about a game that might be better than Desktop Tower Defence, but also entirely different.