September 2009

Defense Grid: The Awakening

September 21, 2009

Tower defense is a genre that has taken off in recent years. Titles like Savage Moon, Comet Crash, and Plants Vs. Zombies all manage to stand on their own as full titles instead of add-ons for RTS titles. Defense Grid: The Awakening is the newest console addition to the tower defense library (it is also available on PC). As is common in tower defense games, Defense Grid is much more about gameplay than story. With ten tower types, three levels per tower, and enemy pathing that varies depending on your tower placement Defense Grid can afford to skimp on the narrative.

You will start with access to only one type of tower, the gun tower. This is your most basic unit, and it can attack both ground and air units. As the game progresses your AI companion, a man with a British accent who was downloaded in the titular defense grid, will find or create new tower types and upgrade abilities. After the first few levels you will need to decide between gun, inferno, laser, temporal (slow), tesla (lightning), missile (anti-air), command (extra money), cannon, concussion, and meteor. Each tower type serves a specific purpose and has trade-offs associated with it. Tesla towers, for example, gain power as they charge so they make a good exit defense on maps where the enemies have separate entry and exit points. Gun towers are also cheap enough to be useful in creating mazes for the enemies to traverse. Enemy type also factors into tower selection. Gun tower are good for taking down shields, while laser towers are good for dealing with fast enemies.

In addition to a decent-length campaign, Defense Grid also has numerous challenge modes for all levels save the tutorial. There are the standard, more/harder enemies variants, but things like Poison Core in which you have only one power core that is lethal if moving back to its base instead of 24 benign cores spice things up. Many levels also feature a practice mode in which resources are fixed at 20,000. This gives players the chance to fine tune their strategies for the trickier maps. Each campaign level and challenge variant also features a medal system. Points are scored based on sale (not purchase) value of towers, remaining resources, and remaining power cores. In order to attain anything better than bronze you will need to protect all of your cores and win the level with the fewest number of towers possible. The difference between silver and gold for me on an early mission was a level 1 laser tower that turned out to be unnecessary. This medal system will keep players coming back and altering their strategies in order to get the next reward and see just how efficient they can be.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is what retail tower defense titles should be. It is fun, deep, and it has a good amount of replay value built-in. The concept is easy to grasp, but perfecting its execution will take even seasoned tower defense pros a while to figure out. In a genre where more units and more upgrades is typically regarded as better it is refreshing to see one place value on something else (bang for your buck) for a change.

Plays Like: Flash Element TD, Desktop Tower Defense

Pros: Good selection of towers, great selection of play types, rewarding medal system

Cons: Devilishly hard on later levels

ESRB: E10+ for fantasy violence and mild language – the enemies are robots who explode upon death – if your kid can play without being frustrated then Defense Grid is fine.

Win My Copy: Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days

September 21, 2009

News / by Chris Rasco /

It’s another crazy Monday around here and after being stuck at home for nearly 5 days with a sick family, I’m ready to have some fun. First on the list for today is to giveaway a copy of Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days for the PSP. All you have to do is post and tell me why you deserve it and I’ll pick someone to get my copy of the game.

Simple enough?

The Fine Print: Must be 18 to win and reside in the US or Canada. I won’t sell or peddle your personal info. Cool?

The little touches: Sound design in video games

September 20, 2009

Features / Opinion / by Andrew Passafiume /

A game’s sound design could bring you into the experience or completely take you out of it. Some look for realism, others look for dramatic music stings, and some just want a lot of shit to blow up. Either way, there is generally a game or selection of games to suit your needs. Sound design is something that takes a lot of patience, but once the designers get it right, it will bring you into an experience even more so. Especially the games that rely heavily on sound effects and less on music. These are the little touches that matter most.

When running through the large battlefields in Killzone 2, you feel the intensity of battle. The Helghast shout, several grenades go off, and the constant sound of gunfire only helps you realize that you may not survive the fight. Before you can take cover, a Helghast charges up with a shotgun. It’s already too late, as your lifeless body hits the ground. It is at this point you realize it still is only a video game.

Call of Duty 4 has a very similar affect, and handles it in a way no other war game has in the past. It’s not the most realistic experience around, but it won’t matter when the sounds around you can lead to your virtual life or death. Eventually you begin to recognize certain sounds, like that of a grenade falling to the ground. The little touches that bring you into the experience so much more than any movie, television show, or book ever could.

Sound design is absolutely crucial when it comes to games. You are experiencing what is happening, you control the character, it’s all interactive. So the sound design needs to match it so precisely, because even if it is off just slightly, it may bring you out of the experience completely. It’s said bad voice acting can make characters in an RPG (or any game, for that matter) unlikeable, and make you potentially lose interest in the story. Whether or not that is true depends on the person, but I guarantee most of you can find an example of when it is true. Same goes for those little sounds, the ones that can make or break how much you immerse yourself into a game.

Dead Space, an excellent action/horror title from late last year, had some of the best sound design I’ve heard in any video game to date. I think the best effects are the ones where your character, Isaac, needs to go outside of the ship and into space. And, as expecting, it’s completely noiseless, aside from your character’s own heavy breathing. Of course, when you least expect it, an enemy could attack, as quiet as anything else in this specific environment. (If you haven’t played it, check it out for yourself.)

So many different things go into a game’s development, but for just about all games, nailing down great sound design is crucial. And the hard work put into something that seems so simple really pays off in the end, and could, even just slightly, improve your experience with a game. It’s hard to tell for sure just how much it impacts your enjoyment of a game, that really depends on the person playing, but there is no denying that the best sound design immerses you in the experience almost flawlessly. Just those little touches that make everything that much better.

Gaming Unplugged: FITS

September 20, 2009

Features / Unplugged / by Chris Ingersoll /

If any game were to be nicknamed “Tetris: the Board Game” (other than the actual Tetris board game… both of them), FITS would be at the front of the line and elbowing competitors like Blokus out of the way. FITS — which stands for “Fill In The Spaces” — is a Reiner Knizia design and published by Ravensburger, supporting one to four players.

Each player gets a ramp that holds a board and a plastic slide. Each board has a dozen lines of six dots each, with some boards containing additional symbols used for scoring purposes. Along with the ramp comes an assortment of blocks, from three to five blocks in size. A card representing each block is also included, as well as four special “start block” cards.

Play is quick and simple. Each player randomly takes one of the start cards and slides that block on to his ramp. Then a card is turned up and every player places that block; when your start block’s card comes up you simply don’t place a block on that occasion. This repeats until the deck is exhausted, although most players will probably fill up their ramp long before that happens (blocks can be placed above the dots, but may not breach the side walls). Blocks must “drop” straight down, and cannot shift into awkward spaces or rotate after you decide where they’re going; in other words, once you miss the opportunity to fill in a space, you can never correct that mistake. This is unfortunate, as every unfilled space will cost you a point at the end of the round.

While the point-per-dot penalty applies to all rounds of play, each round has its own unique way to gain points. Round One simply awards you one point for each fully-filled line; this is the warm-up, and it’s more difficult than you might think. Round Two features specific dots that are worth one, two, or three points if they are uncovered at the end of the round; Round Three is similar but also contains five-point penalty dots that you definitely want to cover up ASAP. Finally, Round Four challenges you with five pairs of symbols; each pair of symbols left uncovered is worth three points… and each partially-uncovered pair (that is, every unpaired symbol) is a three-point penalty. Yeah… that’s as evil as it sounds, believe me. Negative scores happen (in each round) and are surprisingly common.

FITS is really a solitaire game at heart; even with multiple players it’s really just several solitaire games comparing scores against each other. The only difference is the start piece of each player and the decisions that must be made as the ramps fill up. That being said, there’s a strange sort of amusement that comes when the next piece is perfect for your ramp but hellish for everyone else’s. This can also be a source of “analysis paralysis,” as players try to minimize the damage they’re about to inflict on themselves, but other than that a single game should be done in about 30 minuets, tops. FITS may never be the main event at game night, but it’s a brain-taxing filler that is more than capable of giving you fits (yeah… I went there).

Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal

September 15, 2009

PC / Reviews / by Justin Last /

Telltale is something of an anomaly in the games industry. Why? They are making point and click adventure games. Bone episodes, Sam & Max seasons, Wallace & Gromit, and now Tales of Monkey Island. Telltale has found a winning formula with episodic adventure games. Not only does this model allow the player to check out the first entry cheaply, but it also stops the adventure games from becoming too cumbersome. There is no pie to pick up in the first 20 minutes of gameplay that won’t be used until eight hours later precisely because there is no eight hours later. The bite-sized nature of episodic gaming lends itself extremely well to the core concepts of Monkey Island.

Mechanically, Screaming Narwhal deviates from Telltale’s other games. No longer will you point and click to move. Click and hold anywhere on the screen and then move the mouse in the direction you would like to move. The system takes a little getting used to, but once you do it works really well and feels much more natural than clicking at random and watching the main character move around. It also easily facilitates quick movement by holding both mouse buttons instead of just the left to run. Picking up, combining, and using items are all straight-forward. Click on an item to pick it up, click on another item with that item to use it, or put two items in the combiner on the inventory screen to combine them.

Screaming Narwhal manages to keep my favorite part of the old Monkey Island games alive and well – their humor. There is no insult swordfighting, but you will take part in a bar brawl, help an action figure aficionado, and follow a couple truly bizarre maps. As the game opens, Guybrush is set to finish off LeChuck for good, rescue Elaine, and sail off into the sunset on a ship full of pirate booty. Bumbler that he is, Guybrush manages to foul things up and get himself stranded on Flotsam Island. The puzzles you will find on Flotsam are well thought out, and the map puzzles, in particular, are great.

It is difficult to talk about a story and puzzle-centric game without giving things away so I won’t. All I can really say is that both are worth experiencing, and if you are a fan of the genre then you won’t come away from Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1 – Launch of the Screaming Narwhal disappointed.

Plays Like: Sam & Max seasons, Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures

Pros: Clever puzzles, funny story

Cons: Low replayability (inherent in the genre)

ESRB: E10+ for alcohol reference, comic mischief, mild language, and mild suggestive themes – by the time you can solve the puzzles without opening up a browser and heading to GameFAQs the content is not inappropriate

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