Video Games: PC, PSP, PS3, xBox, and Wii Gaming News

So I got bored recently, and decided to take a stroll down memory lane, aka Flash Games Avenue. I rediscovered a classic: Defend Your Castle. The goal here is to defend your castle from barbarians, who are actually just stick figures. I find the first few stages the hardest because you have to do everything by hand. You have to click on each stick figure and fling him into the air, letting gravity chalk up another kill. As you accumulate points, you can upgrade your castle such that you can “convert” the barbarians and train them to man your castle as archers, wizards, kamikazees, or craftsmen.

Repair Damage: Fix damage incurred to your castle
Upgrade Walls: Increase your castle’s ability to withstand the onslaught
Temple: With this upgrade, you can drop enemy units (gently) into your castle to convert them to your side. These converts can be trained or deployed as kamikazee units.
Archery Range: Train archers to defend your castle automatically
Workshop: Train craftsmen to repair your castle automatically
Mana Pool: Train wizards to use powerful spells
Demolition Lab: Allows you to deploy kamikazee units by clicking the convert icons below your castle hitpoints. Click the unit to detonate.

My strategy is to buy a Temple, and then an Archery Range as soon as possible after that, training my converts into archers. Then I skip the Workshop and the Demolition Lab, and save up for the Mana Poll. It is crucial to get the Mana Pool because wizards have powerful spells such as instant kill, massive explosion, and instant conversion. Thus you can eventually begin to compound the number of converts you get, and the rate at which you get them, by investing in wizards. It gets extremely simple when you have a sufficient amount of converts there is literally nothing left to do!

Even though the stick figures have buffed-up, do more damage, and run extremely fast, they are of little challenge to take out because I have 1630 archers, 728 craftsmen, and 215 wizards. You should get over 200 wizards so that mana-regeneration doesn’t become a problem.

That’s right. I didn’t get bored until I got to the 59th stage of Defend Your Castle and had acquired over 13 million points. That’s how addicting it is. Two thumbs up for this flash game! You can play it here.

Atari and Saber Interactive are offering PC gamers a chance to beta test the multiplayer component of the time-bending FPS, TimeShift. Minimum system requirements include:

CPU: 2 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
HDD free space: 6 GB
Video Card: 128 MB VRAM, pixel shader 1.1 support
Network: ADSL or better

We covered Nescover’s 16 NESified hits earlier this month, and now Something Awful forums has done it again! They are now hosting “A Very 8 Bit Xmas”, which is their Christmas Holiday themed music, synthesized with the PSG audio system of the NES. Here’s what’s on the disc:

1) It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas – Perry Como
2) Carol Of The Bells – Mykola Dmytrovich Leontovych
3) Russian Dance (Trepak) – Tchaikovsky
4) Silver Bells – Bing Crosby
5) You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch – Thurl Ravenscroft
6) Let it Snow – Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne
7) I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year – Eddie Pola and George Wyle
9) What’s This? – Danny Elfman
10) Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley
11) Christmas Don’t Be Late – Dave Seville
12) Feliz Navidad – Jose Feliciano
13) The Twelve Days of Christmas (speed mix)
14) Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
15) Winter Wonderland – Felix Bernard
16) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine

Grab this one while it’s hot, either on BitTorrent or from SA Forums.

If you haven’t played Samarost, you’re missing out! Kotaku praises it as “ethereal, weird, completely gorgeous and just a bit compelling. Part Myst, part Le Petit Prince, it takes some self-control to play as the story unfolds at its own pace, not yours. But it’s worth it.” Once you finish this game, get on to the newly-released sequel, Samarost 2! If this game weren’t free, it would definately be on my Christmas wishlist.

The Breed Love Odyssey Tour, featuring Mos Def, along with Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch and Jean Grae, is being sponsored by Playstation and was launched October 28. Playstation is promoting their PSP heavily by giving a copy of NBA ‘06 for the PSP and 25 free song downloads to the first 50 people to show their PSP system to “the Street Teams” at each event. The Tour (and promotion) ends on December 13.