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| Re: "Reskinned Plants vs Zombies" by Mischief Maker 03/31/2012, 6:38pm PDT | ||||
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fabio wrote: You must be mixing me up with someone else. I did say in my American Beauty review that Kevin Spacey was a bad father because he was fine with his daughter dating a guy he knew was a dealer and knew wasn't growing his own. Are you inferring that I think wacky weed is the bad part here? Whether or not I think selling pot should be illegal is irrelevant, the fact of the matter is that pot is illegal and consequently a lot of the people who deal it are pieces of shit you wouldn't want in the lives of your loved ones. I'm sure the trust-fund dealers you buy from in Williamsburg are perfect paragons of virtue. Back to the issue at hand: Plants vs Zombies and Unstoppable Gorg are about creeps following multiple paths to your base that might as well be straight lines for all the effect they have on the creep movement. The main challenge is leaving yourself as vulnerable as possible at the start to build a money-producing economy sufficient to allow you to build the correct turrets in the correct order for each path necessary to neutralize this round's particular enemy combination. Gorg's main extra hook is letting you dig up and replant your towers from one spot to another if zombies stop coming down row 2 and start coming down row 5, for example. Every level introduces a new tower that isn't really anything new to people who played tower defense before. Here's your pea shooter, here's your strong'n'slow, here's your really slow-firing but area-affecting missile tower, etc. Actually I will agree the comparison is a bad one in that plants vs zombies at least gave the player some flexibility to try different strategies and allowed them to plant in every single square on the lawn. In Gorg, there are fixed hardpoints on the orbits in specific spots and it's blatantly clear the designers had one "right" solution for this level, it's the player's job to figure it out through trial and error. Immortal Defense has creeps proceding along a single path, but the path has actual terrain properties that need to be taken into account. For example, they move faster on straighter parts of the path, but slower on curved. If this was Gorg, where the towers simply subtract hitpoints from creeps entering their circle at a set rate, you'd just stuff as many towers on the loops as you can. But in Immortal Defense, the bullets your towers shoot are moving objects and taking full advantage of their properties can let you squeeze more damage out of a tower than simple arithmetic would indicate. For example, the Courage point shoots enemy-penetrating spikes in a shotgun spread. If you position it so the first salvo is pointed down a straight line, some of the spikes will go through several fast-moving creeps and up the total damage per shot. Ortho points do powerful group damage, but they only fire directly up, down, and to the sides, so you have to be very meticulous in setting up a trap to bunch the creeps in a single spot. Etc. Unlike Gorg, Immortal Defense lets you place towers anywhere, letting the player come up with their own solutions to levels. Some levels clearly are designed to have the player to a specific thing, but you're free to go off the rails and try a completely different strategy and win. To sum up, the challenge of PvZ and Gorg is arithmetic. The challenge of Immortal Defense is Geometric. |
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