OrangeSwarm

Alright, short and simple Tower Defense owns. Now that, that has been said I can get serious. Probably the only online mode I know off where team play is essential while still being extremely competitive. More or less all tower defense maps work with players having to defend a certain spot or area in the map. Enemies spawn in waves or as a constant stream and each one making it to the end zone will cost the player lives, time, or cash, which in all cases is bad. As the player beats the waves he is rewarded and as such can make more or better towers. This vicious cycle continues until the player loses or beats the final wave.

I am not the oldest player in the world, and no I didn’t play pong on my TV, I started playing games when having a cable Internet connection was the sweetest things in the world. Coincidentally this is also when I lost most of my remaining innocence.. I remember going to a friends house, Morgan, who had the Starcraft. I was instantly hooked. Problem was he used a mac so I couldn’t take the game with me. A couple of months later another friend Mathew finally gave me a burned copy with nocd-hack. Life was good.. using the badass AOL connection I started playing online. I don’t remember if I had a legit serial but I could get on battlenet. Thus I came into contact with the first Tower Defense maps. If anyone knows TD games before this time let me know!

Couple years later I started playing with Tower Defense with other friends, such as Terror and Demon. Starcraft tower defense maps are some of the purest TD games I know. Countless maps and versions have suffered defeat at our hands. Some maps like HGMA (Hydra-Ghost-Marine-Archon) were labeled by us as hack maps, or otherwise unfair. Seemingly unbeatable, after hours of gameplay the final wave was so strong it was just impossible to beat. Since everyone updated their SC:BW we cant seem to find a working HGMA defense map. If anyone has a map that works with the latest version let us known!

[screenshot HGMA]

Lo and behold the next generation of tower defense maps. Warcraft III was the next script-able game with Tower Defense maps. This is currently my favorite platform for playing TD maps. There are countless variations of maps all with unique twists. Some are hard, most impossible. You can find some of the Tower defense battle reports [here]. The fun thing about Warcraft III maps is that there are a vast amount of units and heroes which can make the game extra fun, games like Bayus TD make maximal use of this.

About the same time as Warcraft III, flash games became increasingly popular. Soon enough flash games started serving the somewhat niche market of Tower Defense. Resulting mostly in shit games, with notable exceptions of-course. Some of these flash games play better then triggered maps. Its a different experience with a lower learning curve. Some of the notable flash TD maps:

• Desktop towerdefense
• Bloons Tower Defense
• Ultima Defense – Personal favorite, go UO!

Looking forward we can expect a new series of tower defense games to arise with the release of starcraft 2. SC2 will also come with a map editor and various scripting function so lets pray for some decent maps. Other then that the future of TowerDefense gaming looks pretty boring.. i have not found a “wow” effect flash game as of yet and there have been various attempts to have games centered around tower defense. Most notably GardenDefense. Originally a flash game it was transformed to an executable and sold for something like 35 dollahs which is quite a lot in my opinion.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, leave a comment and have a look at the following sections of the website which might also interest you:

• WC3 TFT with TD maps (full)