Defense Grid: The Awakening

 

I just played through Defense Grid: The Awakening. Out of the blue I felt like trying a tower defense game and after perusing the Steam list and doing a quick internet search this one looked like the one I would have the most fun with. There are so many tower defense games out there now but very few are strictly tower defense, usually they’re a mash of genres with stuff like resource gathering or base building and that sort of thing. Defense Grid wants nothing but to be a tower defense game and that’s what I was looking for.

The graphics have an alluring appeal to it, the towers and aliens have just the right amount of color, without becoming jarring or bleak. Music is OK, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Gameplay is very repetitive actually but in a relaxing sort of way which is a hard balance to achieve. I think the difficulty is a bit wonky though, where most of the stages (there are 20 of them) feel a little too easy and you can pretty much brute force your way to victory by spawning a huge amount of guns in the obviously right places. Then, by stage 17 or 18, the game sends wave after wave of very spongy enemies that can breeze through your defenses. The level called Waste Disposal took me about a dozen tries to get through and that’s when you begin to realize there’s very little room for error with this game. In fact your best bet is just spawning cannons, they’re relatively cheap and carry a heavy punch.

The most fun levels were the ones you get to shape the path the aliens take by placing towers in front of them in order to make a labyrinth to mow them down more effectively, but those are rather rare and far between. Most of the time the aliens are running through a predefined path and you just get to choose your weapon, usually the cannon or the meteor strike that is not that great but it has a great range, so it’s worth it. Enemy variety is minimal, but then again, you won’t be looking at them closely, it’s mostly a green crate looking thing with spiny legs attached to it. Some look like bugs and that’s about it.

I’m not sure how well I can judge Defense Grid given the only other tower defense game I’ve played is Plants VS Zombies but all in all I had a really good time with it. I know there’s a Defense Grid 2 so I guess I’ll be checking that one next.

Monsters Are My Business

 

I picked up Monsters Are My Business while perusing new stuff coming out. The cover struck me as the writers and artists have a fondness for the good old schlocky comic booky fun and I was right. It’s a comic that doesn’t take itself seriously, mixing some fun modern fantasy tropes and artwork that is giving me a sense of nostalgia for something I can’t quite pin it down. Perhaps the Comix Zone game for the Genesis, and also a smidgen of Metal Slug, I’m not sure.

This is a fast food type of comic, fast pacing, lots of action and likable characters. Not much to think about but super fun to go through. It does a very good job at establishing its characters right off the bat with minimal text, which I love. It’s the sign of a good comic book writer right there. The plot is simple and it’s piece together from well known tropes. Basically an evil cult in the best Lovecraftian tradition brings about some demonic rain that wrecks the planet and now you have all sorts of abominations walking around. The rich are all walled up somewhere but our hero, Tanner "Griz", his mute koala companion Cuddles and a necromancer named Hillary live in the Flooded Zone, helping people in need. If you ever watched the movie Cemetery Man and you like that sort of thing, this book will be a treat for you. It’s like that movie but without the eroticism and a lot more humor to it. I’m very happy to have picked this one up. It’s very refreshing in a way, which is weird because there’s nothing particularly new in this book. The art and the writing have this enthusiasm for the medium that is contagious in a way and I had more fun than I expected. Looking forward to the second issue.

Phantasy Star 3

 

Yesterday I finished Phantasy Star 3 with my brother. It’s funny, I had the impression this is by far the worst of the first 3 Phantasy Star titles but reading my reviews for Phantasy Star 1 and 2, it seems like they’re not too far apart. The third one for sure has the most scattered art direction for the monsters. They’re all over the place and most look rushed to meet the deadline. They have no uniformity whatsoever, some look like crappy Dune character clones, others like wind up toys. Music is generally good and the idea of playing through several generations of the same family is pretty interesting, despite the fact the game stays pretty much the same no matter who you’re playing as. Plot for this one is about this big bad that made his way into the spaceships the Palmians used to escape the destruction of their planet thousands of years ago. The ship you’re in has been drifting in space for who knows how long because there’s no one left that knows how to pilot the thing. A classic Star Trek tale. There’s also a cyborg revolt and family feuds, all told in a rather disjointed manner. There are so many monster encounters and MacGuffin hunting inside labyrinths even if you’re trying to follow the plot you’ll forget what you’re doing most times.

The game looks OK and sounds good. Combat is the same old same old, not really a problem. The real problem with Phantasy Star 3 is the backtracking and the layout of dungeons. The amount of backtrack is truly mind boggling. It feels like the game is trying to defeat both your characters with the monsters and you personally with constant backtracking, furiously testing your patience every time you have to go somewhere. To make you more likely to quit, the dungeons are built to force you to zigzag towards your target, and the correct path always turns out to be the longest one.

So anyways, we cheated. One hit kill and invulnerability. The thing is, those two cheats only solve the heal items maintenance (as in, you don’t need any), leaving the most frustrating part of the gameplay intact so you can experience it in all its glory. All that said, this game does have a lurid charm to it and there are several cut scenes that punctuate the milestones in the plot rather well. So you keep going. We also used maps and a FAQ. There’s enough going back and forth as it is and wandering around lost in those huge maps was out of the question.

It probably took around 10 to 12 hours to complete this thing. It was worth it in a completionism sort of way, having played the first 2. Now the fourth one is the last of the ‘classic’ Phantasy Star titles before the franchise became an mmorpg thingie. I heard good things about 4, I’ll guess we’ll see.