Review: Defend Your Castle for WiiWare
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008When Nintendo boasted that they would be launching the WiiWare service with the intent of making it a haven for indie games, this is certainly what they had in mind. If these types of “arcade” services are meant for simple, pick-up-and-play games that manage to be addictive at the same time, then this game from XGen Studios will be right at home.For anyone who has never played the web app, the game is exceedingly simple, consisting of a static view of a “castle” made of construction paper and a green field which attackers (stick figures with buttons for heads) rush across to attack the walls of your castle. To progress in the game, the player simply grabs the attackers with the Wii remote and flings them to their crushing death.
This gameplay mechanic seems overly simple at first, especially with the excruciatingly slow learning curve on early levels. Gradually, as the pace begins to pick up after many levels, the mechanics become far more frenzied and interesting. Points from each stage clear are tallied and can be spent on an upgrade menu that appears between each stage. Players can redeem points there to build add-ons or fortify the walls of the castle.
This twist is what really gives the game some legs, as the upgrades to the castle allow the player to convert some attackers into defenders of the castle, and with enough purchased add-ons these converted defenders can take the role of archers, builders, demolition specialists or magic users lending their abilities to defending the castle alongside the player.
Defend Your Castle brings to the table some of the most charming art and sound aesthetic I have seen to date in a game. Everything is made to look as if an elementary school student has constructed the gamespace on a boring rainy afternoon. Clouds are made of paper hung by yarn, attacking stick figures carry popsicle sticks as battering rams, or attack with pop-cap gun ammunition rings.
The sound on this game is also fantastic, consisting entirely of sounds made by mouth. Explosions, footsteps, the whistling of arrows, and all other sounds in the game are reminiscent of the days of playing in the yard as a kid and providing your own sound effects yourself. The entire aesthetic of the graphics and sound comes off very much like a Terry Gilliam animated short from Monty Python. It’s a very unique approach that is flush with attention to detail and makes for a very polished, albeit static experience.
The only real drawback to this game is the aforementioned static nature of the game. Stage after stage players look at the same gameboard, with a handful of enemy types and do the same thing they did the stage before, only slightly faster. Every few stages a new type of attacker is added, but still the repetition might be irritating to some. This is the type of quirky game that will be loved by some and hated by others, but at only 500 Wii Points ($5) it is certainly worth a buy, even only as a party game.
Luigi Licciardi, a vice president at Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) told tech journalist David Manners that the company will be selling a 3G iPhone next month. The quote is unambiguous:
It’s not often we see laptop manufacturers boast of a one-hour battery life, but in the case of Eurocom’s new D901C PHANTOM-X “mobile server,” that spec is certainly hard-earned enough to warrant notice. The battery drain begins with a 2.8GHz Quad Core XEON X3360 processor, which gets paired with 1.5 terabytes of storage in the form of three SATA-300 hard drives (complete with various RAID options), 8GB of DDR2-800 memory, a Blu-ray burner, and a comparatively modest 17-inch display, to name but a few specs. All that, not surprisingly, takes just as big a toll on your back as it does on battery life, with the PHANTOM-X weighing in at a lugabble 12-pounds. No word on a price just yet, but Eurocom’s non-Xeon-based server laptops already easily push past the $3,000 mark, so you can probably take a pretty good stab at assessing the damage to your budget.