The game I played most this week: Azgard Defence

Playing defence: Azgard Defence

Azgard Defence (note the quirky British spelling of “defense”) is in the same vein as the Tower Defence line of games. (I’ve never heard of them either.) The game is about defending your castle/stronghold/keep/whatever against increasingly powerful hordes of enemies by building towers and reinforcements to take them out. It’s a bit like an RTS in that you can place your defenses (more or less) wherever you like, and you can upgrade them as the game progresses. The game differs from an RTS, however, in that you’re purely in a defensive mode and cannot explore the area outside your base. The mechanics of the game are also much simpler: enemies don’t really have any strategy apart from appearing out of a sewer-like hole in the ground (which just happens to be right at your base, naturally) and walking around almost randomly once they emerge. The game is over once a certain number of enemies enter your castle (which is a small building tucked inside your base). 

Crude design elements aside, the game looks terrific and is plenty of fun. The audio is also terrific, and the songs remind me a lot of some of the great wavetable tracks we got to hear in games way back when the SoundBlaster AWE32 first came on the market. Most of the game play involves building various defenses just so you can keep up as the enemies endlessly pile in. To be successful, you’ll have to place the right types of defenses, each with various pros and cons. The inclusion of 20+ different enemy types and 15 defensive structure types gives the game a nice balance. For example, one structure uses wind to take out enemies but is only effective against air-based enemies. Level upgrades are available for some defenses and others can be converted to more powerful types of weapons, provided you earn enough money by killing enough enemies. The real challenge of the game is getting just the right mix for the different levels (each has a different map) and the three different difficulty levels.

If you want a complex strategy game, you shouldn’t bother: this one is best left to those who favor arcade action with a small dose of strategy mixed in. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach; sometimes it’s where the best games come from.

News - Werner’s Latest: SNES Emulators

Werner has just released an article on running SNES emulators on the Pocket PC. He cites the abundance of SNES emulators available as the major impetus for writing the article, as well as the following reasons:

1. "there are no real up-to-date articles with REAL-WORLD compatibility information and really dependable and reliable comparison; for example, the only SNES-emulations-specific roundup of available emulators I could find, PDAGameGuide's Top SNES Emulator Downloads Guide For Your Pocket PC, is heavily outdated, only discusses two (very old and, today, in no way recommended) emulators and doesn't at all dive into subtleties like emulating sound or on-screen controls.
2. there are a lot of plain bad information floating around (for example, some people’s praising the absolutely useless Snes9xPPC (by pdafan) or Snes9xJ4u)
3. and even the above-linked WikiPedia article linking in the oldest and least capable SNES emulator version (the original port made by Scott Ramsby)"

I haven’t messed with emulators for about five years. They were neat for a while, but I found them too dodgy to hold my interest. And to me, those old gaming machines—and the games they ran—are really of an incidental and ephemeral interest. The main emphasis should always be on what’s new. I stuck with MAME and the Atari 2600 and NES emulators. The SNES emulators at the time were painfully slow. But now, however, there apparently are several that run very well: http://www.pocketmoregames.com/azgard.htm

-AG

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.