Friday, April 4, 2008

A Little Weird News #5

A Little Weird News for April 4, 2008:

Tower Defense Flash Games Edition (TDFGE for those in the military or in medicine)

Tower Defense (TD) games first came about as off-shoots of Warcraft III (a relative of the Command and Conquer series and made by Blizzard Entertainment, creators of the controversial, yet undeniably fun Diablo series), and involve creating gun turrets of various kinds to shoot endless parades of enemies who walk along a set path from one side of the screen to the next. The enemies usually come in waves and each wave gets progressively more difficult to defeat than the last. You usually have the ability to upgrade your weapens and research new technologies as the game progresses.

Certainly these games are a big waste of time, but what is A Little Weird News if not a series about how to best waste your time? With that in mind, here are some TD games for your perusal and time-wasting enjoyment*:

1. Vector Tower Defense was the first of this genre that I came across and is probably still my favorite. It's combination of simplicity and fun is infectious and it does a great job of walking the line between being easy enough to be fun and difficult enough to challenge you.

2. Flash Element Tower Defense is one of the simplest versions of the TD family that I have seen. It is fun for just a quick play when you have 15 minutes to kill, but it's lack of different levels or many of the add-ons that Vector TD has leads it to be just a cheap copy.

3. Onslaught is a close candidate for my favorite game because, despite the cheesy looking graphics and annoying sound effects, it is very user-adjustable. By that, I mean that you can make your own levels and manipulate how the creatures travel. When you have played a couple of standard levels, click on the maps tab at the top of the screen and try some of the crazy ones people have come up with. The other nice thing about this version is that once you have learned the simple tricks of the game there is a deeper level of play that involves connecting towers together for more power and other such shenanigans.

4. Finally, Random Tower Defense is the one I found this morning. In this one, the creatures that come out are all kinda cartoony. This is a very frustrating game in that the tracks are too short and the money too scarce. Not nearly as fun as the others, but if you have extra time and have already beat everything else, then wander over to play it.

5. If you are still hungry for more, then you can go to freewaregames' page that has a list of TD games (2 of which are reviewed above). I have not played all of them, but I tried the first four. Master of Defense is actually a game that you download to your computer and then subsequently freeze said computer, and Desktop TD is a version that I don't like where you build corridors with your guns for the enemies to pass through.

* Be warned that some of these games require a lot of computer memory, and you may find your computer slowing down considerably as you play. There, I warned you. Now tell your lawyers to back off.

No comments: