Mike`s Blog - Gaming

iPhone Star Defense weapons

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 03:50:34 +0200

When playing tower defense games, it's helpful to know the strength of your weapons. It helps to calculate the best strategy for defending the base against the enemy waves.

For Star Defense (iPhone/iPod game, version 1.3) by ngmoco, i've collected the weapon information for gauss turrets, quantum launchers, DX-3 slow effect weapon, neo-plasma blasters and for phase coils. The sheet below shows initial damage (hitpoints), fire rate (per second), range, duration for effect weapons like the neo-plasma blaster and the effect damage, the speed factor for slow-effect for each of the weapons and for each of the upgrade levels. I've also included the the price of the weapons and the total cost when fully upgraded.

Happy defending!

P.S. How do you get beyond wave 58 on Magna Prime?

Gentleman Cheating

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:42:25 +0200

Most Steam-Games have some kind of achievements which can be earned by doing things within games. In Team Fortress 2, you can get new weapons by earning achievements. Some of the achievements are weird and it's extremely unlikely to get them in free play. Now, if you want to earn some of these unrealistic achievements, you can use special achievement maps. On most of them, a horde of people is killing each other and bots. The servers usually have a very low respawn time and no timeout limit for the maps.

As a result of playing in these achievement maps, you end up with a Steam profile like this:

I don't consider this a real cheating, as you don't harm other people's mood. Instead, you're killing bots for a few minutes to get some of the harder achievements, e.g. for the Heavy.

Defense Grid - The Awakening

info@mhaller.de (Mike Haller) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:00:00 +0100

Yessss! finally I beat the end level of Defense Grid: The Awakening, a 3D tower defence game. I love those games and I've played a lot of them. Starting with very basic tower defence games written as Java Applets and ending with this really beautiful 3D version of the game. The concept is pretty easy: you've got enemies walking from point A to point B and you have to build weapon towers to kill them before they reach point B.

Defense Grid gave me a total of approx. 8hrs of pleasure so far. Most of the maps are not that hard and after a few trials, usually one is able to get the strategy working and finish them up. However, I was kind of stuck in the last level. After a few trials, I gave up and draw the map in OpenOffice, so I could lay out my strategy better and visualize the paths i want the enemies (aliens that is) to take.

Read on to see how to beat the final level of Defense Grid.

Continue reading "Defense Grid - The Awakening"