Towers of synchronicity
Funny how that synchronicity things works.
Some time back, I'm left with half an hour to kill and wander into a Forbidden Planet - it was that or a coffee and I was waiting to go for coffee somewhere else so ...
While browsing the book shelves, one title reaches out.
More Digressions
For those who don't recognise the reference this is a collection of columns from one Peter David (link to his blog to the right). Author didn't ring a bell but I'd recently read a couple of books of compiled columns and a quick flick through suggested I'd enjoy it.
Bought it on the spur of the moment and it was as I read through it over the next few days that I began to recognise the author. For those big into Marvel, he did the stories for Hulk and Spider Man for a time, including the movie adaptations; DC readers may have come across his words in Young Justice, sci-fi buffs may have some of his Star Trek books on the shelf.
How is this relevent to gaming?
Well, Shadow Complex was a recent Live Arcade download. Yes, it is very derivative of Metroid and I do disagree with Orson Scott Card's personal views on gay relationships but it is also a very good game and I do recommend it.
If only my hard drive allowed me to play through the Proving Grounds challenges
Yep, my xbox HDD is definitely turning into an issue. Gears of War 2 we now know will work absolutely fine ... as long as the HDD is unplugged. And this is despite it being a 'disc is unreadable' error.
And while that's an okay fix for retail games, it's a little tricky for Live Arcade downloads. Shadow Complex took over ten hours to complete on my first try (admittedly on a 100% completion run) and a part of that was due to trying not to go too fast as I tend to notice that games crash as lots of stuff happens onscreen.
This freezing has also taken place on Splosion Man a few times and Crackdown more regularly than I would like (most times I've tried to play it)
I'm coming to the opinion that it's a bad sector on the HDD - I've added another couple of Live Arcade games since which seem to be absolutely fine, though to be far they aren't pushing the graphical end.
The latest was Puzzle Quest, which was half price for Gold members. It's basic Match-3 gameplay with a fantasy quest taking place in the background (each game is a 'fight' between your character and generic fantasy enemy - match gems to damage the opponent, build up your mana to cast spells or win coins). The advantage is that grinding is easier - just go to instant action and anything you obtain there is available for your character in the main quest. I managed to get my character to around level 7 in about an hour of play before starting the quest proper and I'm currently riding around on a giant rat.
As you do.
Puzzle Quest shares the Bejewelled, Hexic and Tetris curse of 'just one more' game. And I've had more than one night of " oh crap is that the time" - never good for an insomniac.
The other digital download calling for my time is Defense Grid. This is another tower defence game and I'm going to talk a little more about the genre here.
I think the first concept of tower defence was laid way way back when I first played Rampart. For those who have missed this, you built walls to enclose open ground. These became castles that you could then put cannons onto. While building, pirates (for you were on the coast) would sail by and shoot down your walls. The game was balancing building large castle to claim land (and score) and building cannons to destroy the ships opposing you. The current demo on Xbox Arcade is rubbish by the way. No where near enough time to really get into it.
Fast forward many years and Fieldrunners comes out on iPhone. I don't have iPhone but I remember watching this game over the shoulder of a man who does and being intrigued by the concept.
Think that was the idea that lingered and got me into purchasing Crystal Defenders, remarked in my post of May.
I liked the idea of table top defence but Crystal Defenders is uncompromising in it's approach. 30 waves of bad guys assault and it doesn't seem to reward experimentation - the few times I did, on any map, my resources ran out far too quickly. The enemies travel along paths that you can't place your own warriors on so there's no way to shape their progress. Your warriors (towers!) can be upgraded but it all seems to be a precise balance between getting the right warriors in place and keeping resources for the high score. And the fact that your last gasp bombs (magical summons) deplete the very resource you are collecting is plain mean.
Also in that same May post, I mentioned Plants Vs Zombies. This does seem to reward experimentation. Zombies here travel along a row of lawn; putting platns down allows you to attack them or at the very least slow them down as the zombies turn out to omnivorous and quite happy to nosh down on cellulose before heading into your home to feast on your brains. The idea then becomes to slow them down with plants that take a long time to be eaten while attacking with plant based weaponry (pea-shooters, corn cannons and fume spraying mushrooms among many others).
And while both games are 'cartoon-y' in design, Plants Vs Zombies is much more light hearted. It comes with a host of mini games that limit types of enemies (just bobsleds full of zombies and zomboni ice makers in one level) or only provide plants on a conveyor belt and even allow a chance to play as the zombies against a set layout of plants. Most importantly, having different levels means that the player only has to get through the next few waves at any given point.
Playing this on a tablet PC also helps to be fair. Being able to tap anywhere on the screen does speed up deployment time and I don't miss having to drop and drag.
Not that tower defence is ruined by having to move a cursor.
The second latest game downloaded onto the Xbox was Defense Grid. Aliens are invading and the only defence here are towers of weaponry. God knows where the armed forces are here.
Defense Grid has a mix of paths only the aliens can travel and areas where towers can be built to shape the path. The aliens will take the path of least resistance - going miles to avoid going against a tower force shield but perfectly capable of doing do if blocked in.
Both this and Plants Vs Zombies just seem more accessible than Crystal Defenders and a little more forgiving (don't mistake that for easy). Resource management doesn't feel like as much of an issue - you still have to do it but getting it wrong doesn't seem to be the end of a level if you do.
More so, it just seems as if these two are designed to have fun with, while Crystal Defenders seems to be geared more to the serious gamer, by which I mean serious not happy, rather than serious hardcore.
It's this that's keeping me from purchasing My Life as a Darklord from WiiWare - that and the lack of a demo.
I really like to try a game before buying it and more likely to buy it if I like the demo. It's why I still want Age of Booty for example, why I won't be getting KaBlammo (guess what game that derives from ...) and why I've purchased the vast majority of games I've owned.
This includes Overlord 2. Now, we like Overlord and while we also like Overlord 2, the camera just seems a little more unsteady this time around while the minions don't seem to be quite as smart as they once were (yes I do want you to grab all those life orbs, Giblet, stop hiding in the hedge with the rest of the Browns). Starting in a mostly night setting also doesn't seem to help as much - I actually quite liked the idea of an evil overlord who was carrying out his nefarious plans during day time and who barely saw the night during his adventures.
Seems a bit more evil ("Hang on, the overlords invading." "But it's elevenses and we've not had our cup of tea yet." "That fiend!")
Ah well, the new tower design is great though and flattening legions of soldiers with a catapult flung boulder is worth a chuckle. I don't know how much of the writing Rhianna Pratchett brings to this but we like the humour also.
That's another those synchronicity things - having a game written by a recognised name author ...
And in another synchronious act, I open this months 'Edge' to found that Desktop Tower Defence is this months The Making Of.. article.
And because you never can have enough, logging onto Facebook while writing this, the first item in the news feed was a friends score on Warzone Tower Defense.
That's enough talk - somewhere, an alien is approaching ...
Some time back, I'm left with half an hour to kill and wander into a Forbidden Planet - it was that or a coffee and I was waiting to go for coffee somewhere else so ...
While browsing the book shelves, one title reaches out.
More Digressions
For those who don't recognise the reference this is a collection of columns from one Peter David (link to his blog to the right). Author didn't ring a bell but I'd recently read a couple of books of compiled columns and a quick flick through suggested I'd enjoy it.
Bought it on the spur of the moment and it was as I read through it over the next few days that I began to recognise the author. For those big into Marvel, he did the stories for Hulk and Spider Man for a time, including the movie adaptations; DC readers may have come across his words in Young Justice, sci-fi buffs may have some of his Star Trek books on the shelf.
How is this relevent to gaming?
Well, Shadow Complex was a recent Live Arcade download. Yes, it is very derivative of Metroid and I do disagree with Orson Scott Card's personal views on gay relationships but it is also a very good game and I do recommend it.
If only my hard drive allowed me to play through the Proving Grounds challenges
Yep, my xbox HDD is definitely turning into an issue. Gears of War 2 we now know will work absolutely fine ... as long as the HDD is unplugged. And this is despite it being a 'disc is unreadable' error.
And while that's an okay fix for retail games, it's a little tricky for Live Arcade downloads. Shadow Complex took over ten hours to complete on my first try (admittedly on a 100% completion run) and a part of that was due to trying not to go too fast as I tend to notice that games crash as lots of stuff happens onscreen.
This freezing has also taken place on Splosion Man a few times and Crackdown more regularly than I would like (most times I've tried to play it)
I'm coming to the opinion that it's a bad sector on the HDD - I've added another couple of Live Arcade games since which seem to be absolutely fine, though to be far they aren't pushing the graphical end.
The latest was Puzzle Quest, which was half price for Gold members. It's basic Match-3 gameplay with a fantasy quest taking place in the background (each game is a 'fight' between your character and generic fantasy enemy - match gems to damage the opponent, build up your mana to cast spells or win coins). The advantage is that grinding is easier - just go to instant action and anything you obtain there is available for your character in the main quest. I managed to get my character to around level 7 in about an hour of play before starting the quest proper and I'm currently riding around on a giant rat.
As you do.
Puzzle Quest shares the Bejewelled, Hexic and Tetris curse of 'just one more' game. And I've had more than one night of " oh crap is that the time" - never good for an insomniac.
The other digital download calling for my time is Defense Grid. This is another tower defence game and I'm going to talk a little more about the genre here.
I think the first concept of tower defence was laid way way back when I first played Rampart. For those who have missed this, you built walls to enclose open ground. These became castles that you could then put cannons onto. While building, pirates (for you were on the coast) would sail by and shoot down your walls. The game was balancing building large castle to claim land (and score) and building cannons to destroy the ships opposing you. The current demo on Xbox Arcade is rubbish by the way. No where near enough time to really get into it.
Fast forward many years and Fieldrunners comes out on iPhone. I don't have iPhone but I remember watching this game over the shoulder of a man who does and being intrigued by the concept.
Think that was the idea that lingered and got me into purchasing Crystal Defenders, remarked in my post of May.
I liked the idea of table top defence but Crystal Defenders is uncompromising in it's approach. 30 waves of bad guys assault and it doesn't seem to reward experimentation - the few times I did, on any map, my resources ran out far too quickly. The enemies travel along paths that you can't place your own warriors on so there's no way to shape their progress. Your warriors (towers!) can be upgraded but it all seems to be a precise balance between getting the right warriors in place and keeping resources for the high score. And the fact that your last gasp bombs (magical summons) deplete the very resource you are collecting is plain mean.
Also in that same May post, I mentioned Plants Vs Zombies. This does seem to reward experimentation. Zombies here travel along a row of lawn; putting platns down allows you to attack them or at the very least slow them down as the zombies turn out to omnivorous and quite happy to nosh down on cellulose before heading into your home to feast on your brains. The idea then becomes to slow them down with plants that take a long time to be eaten while attacking with plant based weaponry (pea-shooters, corn cannons and fume spraying mushrooms among many others).
And while both games are 'cartoon-y' in design, Plants Vs Zombies is much more light hearted. It comes with a host of mini games that limit types of enemies (just bobsleds full of zombies and zomboni ice makers in one level) or only provide plants on a conveyor belt and even allow a chance to play as the zombies against a set layout of plants. Most importantly, having different levels means that the player only has to get through the next few waves at any given point.
Playing this on a tablet PC also helps to be fair. Being able to tap anywhere on the screen does speed up deployment time and I don't miss having to drop and drag.
Not that tower defence is ruined by having to move a cursor.
The second latest game downloaded onto the Xbox was Defense Grid. Aliens are invading and the only defence here are towers of weaponry. God knows where the armed forces are here.
Defense Grid has a mix of paths only the aliens can travel and areas where towers can be built to shape the path. The aliens will take the path of least resistance - going miles to avoid going against a tower force shield but perfectly capable of doing do if blocked in.
Both this and Plants Vs Zombies just seem more accessible than Crystal Defenders and a little more forgiving (don't mistake that for easy). Resource management doesn't feel like as much of an issue - you still have to do it but getting it wrong doesn't seem to be the end of a level if you do.
More so, it just seems as if these two are designed to have fun with, while Crystal Defenders seems to be geared more to the serious gamer, by which I mean serious not happy, rather than serious hardcore.
It's this that's keeping me from purchasing My Life as a Darklord from WiiWare - that and the lack of a demo.
I really like to try a game before buying it and more likely to buy it if I like the demo. It's why I still want Age of Booty for example, why I won't be getting KaBlammo (guess what game that derives from ...) and why I've purchased the vast majority of games I've owned.
This includes Overlord 2. Now, we like Overlord and while we also like Overlord 2, the camera just seems a little more unsteady this time around while the minions don't seem to be quite as smart as they once were (yes I do want you to grab all those life orbs, Giblet, stop hiding in the hedge with the rest of the Browns). Starting in a mostly night setting also doesn't seem to help as much - I actually quite liked the idea of an evil overlord who was carrying out his nefarious plans during day time and who barely saw the night during his adventures.
Seems a bit more evil ("Hang on, the overlords invading." "But it's elevenses and we've not had our cup of tea yet." "That fiend!")
Ah well, the new tower design is great though and flattening legions of soldiers with a catapult flung boulder is worth a chuckle. I don't know how much of the writing Rhianna Pratchett brings to this but we like the humour also.
That's another those synchronicity things - having a game written by a recognised name author ...
And in another synchronious act, I open this months 'Edge' to found that Desktop Tower Defence is this months The Making Of.. article.
And because you never can have enough, logging onto Facebook while writing this, the first item in the news feed was a friends score on Warzone Tower Defense.
That's enough talk - somewhere, an alien is approaching ...
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Rob