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Tower defense games have an interesting history. After being born in mods for Blizzard’s RTS games, the genre spread to the Flash game circuit, where it was again iterated on incessantly. Between the two, it seems like almost every gameplay permutation possible had already been divised and experimented with. Recently, dedicated commercial tower defense games have started to appear; Ninjatown is one of them.

Ninjatown the brand is apparently a spinoff of a thing called Shawnimals, which are admittedly amusing cute-ified designs of everyday non-ninja objects. Let’s face it – at this point, ninjas are Interneté passé. Nerds on forums have picked the ninja corpse funny bone clean. (I’m hoping this fate does not befall hoboes, which are currently my go-to amusing group of historical individuals.)

Ninjatown, though, is so damn charming it overcomes its ninja cliché roots and is just plain hilarious. Behold, the Ninja Consultant. His skill with charts and graphs will make your troops just that much more efficient. However, unlike its art style, Ninjatown can’t quite pretty up the gameplay enough to make it stand totally above and beyond the myriad of other takes on the genre all over the Internet. Though it is derivative and it brings nothing truly innovative to the table, it’s an excellent execution of the concept and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Ninjatown is a corridor-based TD game, none of this free-form, place your towers wherever you want insanity. Bad guys (in this case, demons who want to steal the ninja cookie recipe) walk down a path, and you have to stop them from getting to the end. Standard stuff.

I am probably not the most skilled TD player around, but I have played a fair amount of them, and Ninjatown is hard. You’ll start to be challenged after only a few levels, and it quickly gets even more challenging, but in a fun way. The fact that the game is separated into levels, unlike the traditional marathon structure, means that the difficulty never feels unfair, and the short levels encourage experimentation with different strategies, which will be required. The game isn’t too cruel to players new to the genre, however; MY GIRLFRIEND had never touched a TD game and was able to progress without too much frustration.

There are a few twists to the gameplay. The old man ninja, seen lurking to your right, gains a number of stylus and microphone based special powers which can be used directly by the player to great effect in the right situation. The maps can also contain various twists on the formula that occasionally stumble, but generally enrich the experience with a bit of variety.

Ninjatown’s greatest strength is its premise. The art is buoyed by appropriately hilarious writing and plot developments, which is augmented by its fun-but-pedestrian gameplay. The tower defense genre is rather appropriate for a handheld, and I hope to see more of them on the DS, but it will be hard for one to top the charming premise present in Ninjatown.

It fills me with disappointment that I cannot really call this article a review. To review “Samba de Amigo” would require me to have played it extensively, and sadly, “Samba de Amigo” for the Wii is too broken for me to tolerate it for very long at all.

I want to be upfront about the amount of time I spent playing the Wii version of “Samba” - probably only about 30 minutes. I will also be candid on the amount of time I spent on the Dreamcast original and its Japanese sequel - it could probably be counted in days.

For the uninitiated, “Samba de Amigo” was and is a rhythm game about shaking maracas at various positions to the beat of saucy Latin tunage. The Dreamcast version used an accurate but flimsy set of maraca controllers. (I went through three sets!) Unfortunately, what the Wii version gains in durability, it loses tenfold in accuracy. It’s simply difficult to make the Wii version recognize where you are shaking your Wiimotes.

The reason for this is that though the input is superficially the same - moving objects in your hand to various heights - it is actually very different. Whereas the Dreamcast original was asking you to position the maracas at various heights along two columns, the Wii version is asking for you to position the Wiimote in different directions.

Example time! In order to hit the notes in the top right circle, the Dreamcast version would have you raise one of your maracas to the top right and shake. On the Wii, you have to angle one of your Wiimotes at a 45º angle pointing upward. This only kinda works because your hand sort of naturally does these angles when you raise or lower them to the appropriate levels. However, the other half the this game’s entire design - shaking to the beat a la maraca - breaks that entire idea apart.

The system only works on the level of “okay” when you are trying to learn it, and might work fine for new players on lower difficulty levels, but if you try to get into it and really let loose while enjoying the ridiculousness of shaking around what are now <i>fake</i> fake maracas, you are not going to hit notes consistently, and if you try to play on harder difficulties, you are really not going to hit notes consistently.

It is not hyperbolic for me to say that, personally, this is probably the most disappointing thing ever related to the Wii. Official Sega-brand Dreamcast maracas go for a pretty penny on eBay, usually about $100, and on top of that, often ship from Japan, so a good version of Samba de Amigo on a modern console with a durable controller was something of a holy grail for me. And it even supports downloadable content! On the Wii! Holy shit! Too bad it’s intrinsically broken.

This failed experiment does provide an interesting perspective on “Samba” the game, though. It does feel very simple in this post-Harmonix world, but this is not a bad thing at all. Through the layer of shit that is the controls, I was still able to catch a glimpse at the gameplay that had entranced me years ago, and hot damn, does it still seem like fun! …which makes this all the more tragic.

It is hypothetically possible the upcoming Wii MotionPlus add-on might solve the problems that led to “Samba’s” gimped, broken control scheme, and just maybe, a poorly-reviewed rhythm game about shaking maracas to Latin music might sell enough in this Rock Band-dominated world to warrant a follow-up that would require rewriting large amounts of the game code to use an add-on device, but I’m not holding my breath.

For myself, and people I usually play Rock Band alongside, score is a secondary concern. In fact, we don’t really care at all. We just want to have fun pretending to play music we love with fake instruments. This is also the attitude of anyone playing Rock Band at a party casually. They just want to have fun.

Unfortunately, failing a song absolutely kills the mood at a party. If players couldn’t completely fail a song, then the game would be much more friendly for social situations. Just letting the song limp along with some sort of “assisted help” mode once a player screws up bad enough would be a lot better than the usual “well, let’s do something else!” result of people failing at a party.

But would lacking a fail condition make higher-level play worse, assuming that failure-free play wasn’t relegated to being an option or just one mode? I know the feeling of just barely scraping by on a song but succeeding is great, but the awesome feeling of totally nailing a song would still remain.

Perhaps the star system could replace failure to some degree? In single player and band world tour mode, you might have to earn a certain number of stars in a set or on a song to pass, but the game never tells you that you suck so explicitly, just that you need to do better. The feeling of just barely scraping by could still be preserved, since you might’ve just barely gotten three stars, instead of just barely finishing the song.

Hopefully, for the inevitable follow-up to Rock Band, Harmonix addresses these concerns in some capacity. This is one of many design and interface changes that could be made to Rock Band without damaging the core band gameplay, and I feel that the gameplay can indeed rise to new heights if video game-centric design choices like failing a song are revised to fit in with the game’s core, augmenting rather than hampering the enjoyment of the full band experience.

1) The cars handle really crazily now; I guess they are more realistic? The shitty cars I got to use had a hard time handling at high speeds, and really couldn’t drive on grass at all.

The character seems to have the same sort of rules. You have momentum and can no longer turn on a dime. Jumping still kinda sucks, though, and it was hard to tell what fences you could grab onto and get over, and it was easy to accidentally not make a jump over a short object.

b- There’s a lot of neat procedural animation, even if the whole game isn’t procedurally generated. The game tries to adjust the character so if you are standing with your feet on uneven surfaces, the animations compensate, and you don’t clip through or hover over one. It looks neat.

iii. The multiplayer works exactly like Burnout Paradise.

4. The new wanted system works exceptionally well. Instead of a flat star rating, the first cop that sees you and gives you that one-star wanted level has a radius around him, and if you can escape it then you get off. Any other cop that spots you before you escape also has the radius, and as you get more stars, the size of all the radii increases. The size of a helicopter’s was too big for me to even see on the minimap.

• Add a friend on Xbox® LIVE. (5G)
• Send a message to a friend on Xbox® LIVE. (5G)
• Send a message to a friend on Xbox® LIVE using an Xbox® 360 Chatpad™. (20G)
• Send a message to a friend on Xbox® LIVE and be ignored. (10G)
• Play a game online. (5G)
• Attempt to play a game online, but have crippling network issues. (50G)
• Download an XBOX® 360 demo. (5G)
• Fail a download due to network problems. (10G)
• Download an EA® game demo, and be unable to play because you cannot connect to EA® servers. (40G)
• Download an Xbox® LIVE Arcade™ game demo. (5G)
• Purchase an Xbox® LIVE Arcade™ game, only to discover the multiplayer mode locked in the demo is totally broken and devoid of players. (20G)
• Watch a video. (5G)
• Watch a video purchased from the Xbox® LIVE Marketplace™. (20G)
• Attempt to watch a video purchased from the Xbox® LIVE Marketplace™, but be interrupted by buffering. (100G)
• Play music from a CD. (5G)
• Play music from a portable device. (10G) 
• Play music ripped to your hard drive. (20G)
• Play music from a Zune™ brand portable media player. (50G)
• Play music ripped to your 120GB add-on hard drive. (100G)
• Change your gamerpic. (5G)
• Use an Xbox® LIVE Vision™ camera to change your gamerpic. (10G)
• Use an Xbox® LIVE Vision™ camera to change your gamerpic to a picture of your bathing suit area. (50G)
• Use a headset on Xbox® LIVE. (10G)
• Receive negative feedback from a player following use of a headset on Xbox LIVE. (50G)
• Red ring of death. (0G)

I have actually been playing quite a few Games for Windows® lately, thanks to my purchase of, amusingly, one of these, which has replaced the PC I built after graduating high school and has shat its pants upon encountering 3D games for the past few years. After getting Windows installed and running as optimally as possible, I began to see what kind of games the feeble Intel integrated graphics could handle, which turns out to mostly be things I missed years ago, which is really okay with me.

I’ve gotten through what I suppose were three missions in Deus Ex. It’s astonishing how well it has held up over the years in some ways, but in others it is really dated. The core gameplay can still stand with the best of them – it in fact stands far above many others that have come after it. There are countless ways to perform even the first level’s objectives, and this is before you really get into customizing your character’s abilities and find all sorts of neat toys. This is truly sandbox gameplay and it’s astonishing that this was accomplished eight years ago. The world feels very organic for an Unreal Engine 1 game, thanks largely to the open level design and light RPG elements.

What isn’t faring so well in 2008 is the character models. They look silly. (Perhaps they would look better if this computer actually had a dedicated graphics processor.) The presentation overall, however, is very competent, if a little boring. The cutscenes don’t feature any kind of flair, like moving cameras or any sort of advanced character animation. However, the writing is amazing, and astonishingly relevant and resonating considering the game was made before the 9/11 attacks. Must play more, as UNATCO, the counter-terrorism agency you work for, is seeming more and more evil of late.

Thanks to Gametap, I was able to find out that Civilization IV runs astonishingly smooth on this hardware. (Frankly, I was amazed it ran at all.) I only played a few turns, and I’m told that it slows down late in the game, but it was very pretty from what I saw, and I could feel the tendrils of addiction creeping out of the monitor and wrapping me in their cold, uncaring embrace. For this reason, I have placed it on hiatus until I can tear a sizable chunk out of The List, at which point I might have a more capable computer that could to the game justice. (A few games on that List this computer could not do justice: Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Rise of Legends.)

Next time (probably): More Planescape: Torment.

Random informational factoid:

When playing Rock Band with my friends, I secretly try to get the most points by saving my star power for when one or more other band members are using it, in order to get the band multiplier up. I never mention it to anyone, but it is something that I constantly watch.

Also, Grateful Dead songs are really hard.

That is all.

Lately, I’ve been playing Planescape: Torment on the PC. I really felt like a more slowly paced game after all the fast-paced action games from this fall. I greatly enjoyed Halo 3, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, and the like, but I felt like playing something a little more thoughtful. This 10-year-old RPG is doing the trick.

I can’t imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I’ve visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.

Mass Effect is a pretty good game, but I think I’m having way more fun playing through again as a douchebag. Your character says hilariously assholish things to everyone, but they don’t really react beyond maybe a few words, and then it’s back to the normal script!

When you are on the first planet, and the crazy man in the shed is going on about the end of the world, you don’t have to listen to him, you can just punch him in the face! It’s like your own personal MST3K of a sci-fi movie. I can’t wait to get to the part where the weird guy on the citadel asks you for his autograph.

There are two very different games in the Call of Duty 4 package: the campaign and the multiplayer. This is underscored by the structure of the main menu, which features two totally different sets of choices that you have to switch between. It seems like two separate games, and it is.

The campaign is, in general, roundly mediocre. It’s really the same sort of game that the other Call of Duty games are: Utterly scripted thrill rides through a few different war zones. Sure, COD 4 developers Infinity Ward made the first two, and they were slightly better than the consoled-out spin offs and Call of Duty 3, but they are all riffs on the same formula. Call of Duty 4 has famously jettisoned the series’ World War II setting for one in what I can only assume is the near future. The player switches between an American and British soldier fighting in eastern Europe and a Middle Eastern country that is never explicitly named but is clearly Saudi Arabia if you have any amount of geographic knowledge and pay attention during the pseudo-Google Earth setting change animations.

The game’s opening credits sequence has the player in the role of an ousted Saudi leader as he is taken through a city and then shot by the revolutionary that has just taken over the country, providing the conflict that fuels the rest of the game. The storytelling technique on display here is one of the game’s cooler touches, and there are quite a few interesting devices used to tell the game’s story.

The problem is that the story is really not worth paying attention to. It’s sub-24 level crap, for the most part, with the same number of contrivances and utterly illogical occurrences. In one mission, where you have to capture a dude as the British SAS unit, you chase the guy across a series of small towns, with your commanding officer repeatedly making sure that you all know that you need to capture the guy alive. Then in the next cutscene, after torturing the fellow and getting some information (because that works), your commanding officer proceeds to shoot the guy in the face.

One problem with the series making the jump to modern day is that it really doesn’t make sense to have your character being ordered around by an NPC. In the WWII games, the player is experiencing the Last Great War through the eyes of an anonymous soldier. Modern-day conflicts don’t carry the same weight, especially considering the large-scale opposition to the kind of war on display for the American side of the campaign.

Politics aside, it sucks that your character is so helpless that he can’t even open doors without the help of other soldiers - you have to wait for them to do it for you. Your character can’t do anything that the other soldiers do. You can’t push a dumpster down the street for cover, you can’t lean out from cover or even take cover in the same way that Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas characters can, and you certainly can’t order your soldiers around to intercept incoming enemies.

Speaking of enemies, I hope you like shooting them, because they just keep coming out of these shacks and buildings like they’re some kind of terrorist clown car. Your character is really just supposed to move down the preselected path and shoot enemies they see. The idea of saving grenades or other special weapons for large groups of enemies is irrelevant, since there’s not a predetermined number of enemies per area - they just keep coming until the player manages to advance past an arbitrary line in the level, or kill an enemy inside the shack/house/damaged building that the other terrorists are apparently budding off of asexually.

The only reason this design works is because the levels are as linear as an arcade lightgun game. It might look like you were just dropped off in a warzone and told to get to a building on the other side, but you can’t choose your path in any way, shape or form. You’ll be following a preset path, and any attempt to deviate from it will result in you totally breaking the game’s scripting or you dying. (In one area, to keep you on a set path, there are signs like the mine field signs in the first two games, but this time they are radiation warning signs - because radiation just stays in tiny pockets throughout the landscape.)

If you’re willing to totally turn off your brain and just shoot at things that move in front of you, there are some fairly memorable sequences in Call of Duty 4. One sequence in particular offers a glimpse at another sort of game entirely, where the horrors of war are laid bare in a way I’ve never seen before. But, the ultrapatriotic 24-inspired Call of Duty 4 is not that game. Too bad.

Rez HD is marvelous in every way. It’s a port that’s gotten better with age. I noticed in my playthrough last night that it draws a line between enemy and background by having the enemies never pulsate to the music. The game world draws a line between what is good (the player and the world) and what is bad (things you can shoot) by how things react to music, which is pretty subtle but a really cool effect. It’s most apparent in the boss in area 2 that you get wrapped up in. In other news, you can use extra controllers as extra vibration feedback, which is awesome.

Other than that, it really sucks when you play Burnout with someone who can’t do a challenge, but you don’t want to cancel the challenge and be like, yeah you suck let’s do another one, but if you try to tell them how to do the challenge you just come off as a condescending douchebag.

No More Heroes is fucking nuts. Think Metal Gear Solid, but on meth. You’re a video game nerd who buys a lightsaber on eBay, and is trying to become the number one assassin in the world. You save the game by taking a dump in your shithole apartment. There is a pixelated tiger in the corner of the screen that seems to serve no purpose at all. When you kill a guy, blood and money spurt out of his or her dismembered body. You have to recharge your lightsaber by making masturbatory motions with the Wiimote. Should I go on?

The demo for Devil May Cry 4 is… dumb. It might know it’s dumb, but it’s still written for what seems to be 12 year olds. The giant demon boss at the end assures you that he has conquered fire hell. The combat feels exactly like it did in the last three games, stilted controls and all. Perhaps I’ve just had enough of throwing guys into the air and juggling them there with pistols. Considering I never even finished the first one, skipped the second and only rented the third, that’s probably not the reaction Capcom wanted to elicit.

Oh, Axl, you’re such a poet.

Burnout Paradise has proven me wrong and is totally fantastic. Almost all the misgivings I had about the demo are still valid, but the core design and philosophy behind the final product is so focused and perfect that they don’t matter. You can’t pick events from a menu, but that’s okay because the city is small enough that it’s not too difficult to get around, and interesting enough that you want to explore it between events. This also helps you learn your way around the city.

It’s also a new standard for online integration, as well as the perfect system for online in an open world title. I’m going to be disappoint when GTA IV doesn’t work like this. You can invite a friend or be invited from an easy-to-use D-pad menu, and then the world you are in becomes the online world seamlessly. The host can then decide to make a race event and can set the start and end points anywhere on the map. There’s also challenges, which are just little goals like “boost 400 yards on this street” or “do three barrel rolls on that jump” but when four or five people are all trying to do that, hilarious things occur. This also forces you to learn the nooks and crannies of the city. The design is all-encompassing in its scope, and it’s far more than the sum of its parts. It actually feels astonishingly new - the series has totally reinvented itself for the second time. That said, it’s not perfect. The crash mode replacement sucks really bad and the soundtrack thankfully allows you to toggle off individual tracks. Still, it’s great.

Other than that, I got alien laid in Mass Effect. It’s starting to wear thin; I’m glad I’m near the endgame. I also played Pokemon Pearl a bit on a car trip.

I played Resident Evil 4 for 15 minutes. At first I thought it made the game easier, since the Wiimote is so accurate, but then the first chainsaw guy killed me anyway.

That is all.