Noteworthy Timekiller Alert!

A relatively new tower defense game, available online and for free, called Kingdom Rush is probably the best timekiller available. In terms of quality and polish, this is perhaps the best online tower defense I've ever seen. I am not even going to post screenshots, because they are unnecessary. This game has garnered 17 million plays, is twenty megabytes in size, and can basically make an entire day disappear.

About a year ago I invested a lot of time into the Cursed Treasure series. It was a magnificent game, and Kingdom Rush is along the same lines, except you play for the good team. There are four basic types of tower which upgrade into awesome and excellent killing machines. There are only two special powers and they are both useful and sometimes necessary. Kingdom Rush is not even close to being as long as, say, Gemcraft or anything, but it works so well that I found myself replaying old scenarios for bonus points.

My only gripe is that I can't get to the final secret level and am missing two upgrade points and have no idea where to find them. There's a frozen sasquatch in one level that I think has to do with it, but I can't unlock it. The game also takes a while to get used to - all the towers feel weak at first, but there are a few tactical approaches which mean your towers get as many shots into an enemy as possible. Furthermore there is a great amount of strategy in which towers you build and which you upgrade. Though tower placement is not free-form, I really can't complain about it.

The aesthetics of the game are flawless, it runs well, looks fantastic, and the campaign is excellent. If you are not hateful of tower defense games or sick of them, this is probably your best bet for a while. I myself love a good tower defense game and the really fine work is rare, but so rewarding. You know I will even post a screenshot, just to emphasize that although the game looks prosaic, and is, it plays well enough that you'll forget about the formula and just enjoy it.

That's what games are about. A free game of this quality is always a good thing, and I'd like to warn as many people about it as I can, even though most of the internet knows already. Sometimes you have to have an unoffensive, focused way of killing time, and it helps to spend it on something decent instead of the many polished but bullshit things out there.

Bonus mode includes interesting restrictions which force you to think strategically, as well as in terms of complete overkill. Because to hell with the forces of death and evil.

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! 

Internet Drifter Game City 2000X

Lately with a big news cycle developing, and me without any meaningful perspective, I've been forced to retreat out of the world. Even the world of blogging is too strenuous. There is no logic in any of it and so I've fallen back on the old habit of online gaming. And I mean capitol 'O' online gaming.

Haven't found much good lately, but since this past Thursday I've been playing the new Cursed Treasure map pack, which has been alright. Something has to distract a person, yet I can't honestly say I'm impressed by anything new that was brought out, but it's still a testament to the game's strengths that I find this aptly-titled map pack worth playing. And what a surprise! I was almost ready to imagine that series was dead. But it's only undead. Thank. Damn.

Still there's a major sense of deja vu to contend with – and also a few tricky maps in the vein of the original. This is great for the power gamers who managed to get all "Brilliant" ratings in the old game, but for those of us who could not defeat the dreaded level 3 ninja, this expansion promises nothing but shame and heartbreak. You've been warned.

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.