Free Month of Playstation Plus

Is there anyone who actually had a subscription to Playstation Plus? I mean anyone who’s not a games journalist. I understand that people who wanted to report about what the service actually does subscribed just to let the rest of us know what the heck the service was actually good for. Strange that I haven’t heard much.

Looking it up now, it seems that you get early access to demos and some betas, a free subscription to Qore (the PSN thing that nobody subscribed to before Qriocity was around for nobody to subscribe to) and discounts on some PSN content. You also get limited play time on certain selected games. So basically, Playstation Plus was created as a clearing ground for PSN games that don’t sell. You pay Sony every month, and they’ll let you play the worst of the worst, but only a little.

Movie Rentals for One Weekend

I’d forgotten that “renting” movies from PSN was even an option. One time they made Godzilla 2000 available for free for a few days, and I downloaded that, but the movie was so bad that we didn’t make it halfway through. I expect that most of the PSN offerings that they’ll make free are of the same quality. Besides, I’ve got Netflix and Hulu. Will PSN actually make anything available for free that I can’t already get through either of those channels?

Free Playstation Home items

I tried Playstation Home once. It was terrible, slow, and frankly kind of boring. Does anyone still use it?

A Free Game

So here’s the only thing on the list in which anyone will have any interest. Let’s take a look at the five games on their list.

• Dead Nation
  I’ll be honest. I’d never have been interested in this game if it wasn’t free. But if I’m able to get two of these games then I’ll likely pick up Dead Nation. It allows for online multiplayer, which I’ve only ever done before with HOARD. So maybe I’ll contact my brother for some co-op zombie hunting.
• inFAMOUS
  I played inFAMOUS about a year ago, and it’s not a bad game. But it seems obvious that this game was included primarily to sell the uncoming sequel. I won’t be choosing inFAMOUS since I already own it, but it’s not a bad choice for someone who hasn’t yet played.
• LittleBigPlanet
  Similarly to inFAMOUS, LittleBigPlanet has a sequel, and I’m sure that they just really want to sell copies of LittleBigPlanet 2. Still, not a bad choice. The two games are so similar that (to me) there’s not much of a difference.
• WipEout HD + Fury
  I had to look this one up. Turns out that it’s a racing game, which explains why I’d never bothered to learn anything about it. I’ve got no interest in racing games that aren’t named Audiosurf or MarioKart, so I won’t be downloading WipEout HD.
• Super Stardust HD
  When I first got my playstation, I downloaded the Super Stardust HD demo, and it struck me as a very well done bullethell shooter. I’m not very good at games like this, and I figured I wouldn’t get much further in the full game than I had in the demo, so I eventually uninstalled it. But now that it’s a free game on a list of slim pickins, I’ll probably download it.

In addition to the above Playstation titles, those who own PSPs can choose from the four games below.

• LittleBigPlanet
  The PSP version of LittleBigPlanet isn’t going to be as good as the primary PS3 version, and so it might be better to select another game from this list. And as much as my wife and daughter love LittleBigPlanet, I’m not a fan.
• ModNation Racers
  I tried the PS3 demo, and my opinions of this racer are pretty much the same as my opinions of most racers. Pass.
• Pursuit Force
  After reading about Pursuit Force, I’m marginally interested. Since they’re allowing two free games and I’m not interested in LittleBigPlanet PSP or Modnation Racers, I guess I’ll be trying it out.
• Killzone Liberation
  I’ve heard marginally good things about Killzone Liberation. I’m not a fan of shooters on handhelds, but it’s free, so I’ll be trying it. Can’t be worse than that PSP Tenchu game.

Looking at the PS3 game list, we can see that only two of the five games were ever full-priced retail releases. And those two both have sequels. I suspect that many people are in the same boat as me, owning both of those. Many people may also own the other less expensive downloadable titles. So for many, this customer appreciation program is even more of a sham. I’m not going to pretend that Sony’s outage ruined my life, and I’m not going to claim that they were grossly negligent in their security. But it was inconvenient for me even though I don’t play games online, since I couldn’t stream Hulu, and Netflix was incredibly spotty. If they want to issue an apology by awarding people games, at least they should compile a decent list of choices. I certainly didn’t expect them to give us Beyond Good and Evil HD for free, although that would have been awesome. Let’s look at some of the games they might have offered.

• Assassins Creed
  With three sequels, Assassins Creed is now an officially old game, in the same league as inFAMOUS. It seems natural for them to have included it. But I guess that Ubisoft is too DRM crazy to allow anybody to have anything for free ever. It’s too close to piracy. If Ubisoft had let us have Assassins Creed, they’d have had to phone us every 5 minutes while we were playing just to make sure that we weren’t lending the controller to a visiting friend.
• Borderlands
  It’s not a new game, so why not? Gearbox has already earned the bulk of their money on this game. It’s already downloadable on PSN, and including it would have exposed a lot of people to Borderlands who may not have already tried it.
• Dead Space: Extraction
  This would be a great way to try to get more people to use Playstation: Move. If more games used Move, I might be interested in dropping the substantial cash on the 3-part controller you need to use Move.
• God of War Collection
  Of all the downloadable games on PSN, this would be the one I’d most likely choose if it were free. I’ve already played the games on my PS2, and I’d be unlikely ever to revisit them, but the addition of trophies might make it worth going back and replaying.
• Hoard
  One of the three PSN games that I will likely never uninstall. I’m working my way through Hoard’s “medals”, which are like sub-trophies. Get enough medals and you get a trophy. The game is a lot of fun.
• Pixeljunk
  I know there are plenty: Racers, Monsters, Eden, Shooter, Shooter 2. Although I’ve got a huge affinity for Monsters, these are all good games.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time HD
  I tried the game in its PC incarnation years ago and hated it. But even the HD version is no longer new, and would make a good option for a freebie like this.
• Prototype
  I actually think I liked Prototype a bit better than inFAMOUS. To be honest, they’re basically the same game. But Prototype had better gliding mechanics and I preferred running up walls to slowly climbing them.
• Trine
  One of my favorite PSN games, and my only platinum trophy. It would be a gem of a freebie, and a good promo for the forthcoming sequel.

Too Little Too Late?

It’s easy to scoff at the offer, but I suppose that Sony wasn’t really required to do anything here. They’re not going to lose any money by giving this stuff away, so it’s ultimately just a PR move. Hardcore gamers will likely already have these games. Those who aren’t might not ever realize that there was any freebie to be had.

The obvious big players in this realm are Steam, XBox Live Arcade, The Playstation Network, Direct2Drive, and Impulse which was just purchased by Gamestop from Stardock.

XBLA and PSN are obviously tied to their respective consoles, as is the red-headed stepchild of console download services: WiiWare. While each has some excellent games, (Shadow Complex, Pixeljunk Monsters, LostWinds) we’re still in the infancy of digital distribution in that these services are currently used primarily for inexpensive games. And while download-only games like Costume Quest and Hoard can only improve the popularity of these services, it’s probable that in the next generation of consoles, there will be no physical media aside from optional flash cards or external drives.

Steam is the behemoth of digital distribution. It’s tied to Valve, which in my mind stands alongside Blizzard and Bioware as the best of the best in terms of game production. Steam has an amazing feature-rich client complete with achievements and a well-integrated friends list. And best of all, Steam games work. Always. I’ve had $10 of credit on Direct2Drive for nearly a year now after a refund following purchase of Cold Fear,  which flat-out wouldn’t launch on my PC. Cold Fear and Dark Athena are the extent of my experience with Direct2Drive, and I believe I bought Galactic Civilizations 2 from Impulse following the announcement that the game would be launched with no DRM. I bought that game mainly to support DRM-free software. Didn’t like the game so much, but Impulse functioned well. I think I also bought the first Penny Arcade Adventures game from Greenhouse.

The move away from physical media has many implications. First off, it murders the used games market. This explains why Gamestop, whose primary market is used games, was so eager to jump on the digital distribution wagon. And speaking as someone who gets a lot of his games used from Amazon and EBay, my overwhelming instinct is to flinch and yell “BAAD!” at this inevitibility. But then I look at Steam Deals. I’ve gotten a lot of the games I have in my Steam collection on the cheap. Bioshock 2 for $5. Beyond Good and Evil for $5. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom for $2.50. I don’t remember how much I paid for New Vegas and Metro 2033, but they were cheap too. Digital Distribution doesn’t have to mean that games never drop in price, although it may mean that. It all depends on the distributors.

I’ll leave you with one final thought here. Please never say “Digital Download”. That term bugs the crap out of me. It’s redundant. All downloads are digital. Thank you, and goodnight.

This makes me wonder if Borderlands would have let you see the distant Zombie Island of Dr. Zed over an impassable ocean channel or if Rock Band would mix in downloadable tracks with all the other songs in the list, but not let you access them. It’s an odd new model, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

In part one of this article, I discussed general gameplay strategies. Now, let’s take a closer look at the game’s individual towers. For your convenience, I’ve also created a printable pdf quick reference guide. Yeah, it’s really ugly – I know.

Arrow Tower

The only tower in the game (other than a hive) that can hit both flying and ground enemies, the arrow tower remains useful throughout the game. It’s especially useful at the beginning, as it’s the only way you’ll prevent waves of spiders from getting through. They also work very well when placed near your village as a last resort to pick off wounded monsters that have made it past your other defenses.

Every upgrade except the final upgrade to black is merely a range upgrade, so it’s generally not worth it to spend the gems or the time dancing in upgrading an arrow tower.

Cannon Tower
Cannon towers are the only power weapons you’ll have available early in the game, before fire and mortar towers become available. Later in a level, although they’ll do less damage than fire, tesla, or mortar towers, they’ll still be the backbone of your defense since you’ll have so many built. The greatest flaws of cannon towers is their short range and slow rate of fire.

You have to be very careful when positioning cannons. If they’re too close together, they may both fire at a single monster that could have been killed by one attack, thereby wasting a shot. Since their rate of fire is so slow, other monsters can then sneak by before the cannons can fire again. Also, cannons must be placed as close as possible to the monsters’ paths. Ideally, you want to place them where their area of fire covers a place where the monsters spend the most time. Corners tend to be good places to place cannons, since the cannons will attack the enemies the entire time they’re going around the curve. Every level of upgrade on cannon towers increases power, so upgrade them as much as you can.

Anti Air Tower
Until you can get laser towers, the anti-air tower is the absolute best defense against flying monsters. They’re fast and they have very good range. Although they don’t do much damage, they fire so quickly that the damage will add up. Unlike arrow towers, it’s definitely worth it to upgrade anti-air towers, since every upgrade increases the speed at which they fire. If that means a tower fires at a monster six times as it passes instead of only three, you’ve doubled the damage. The final upgrade is power, and as such is very useful. Unlike cannons, anti-air towers work well when grouped together.

Fire Tower
The fire tower is everyone’s favorite tower, and with good reason. They’re incredibly strong. They’re great for mowing down acorns and golems, and are even fairly effective on fast-moving spiders. They’re also an excellent way to attack bosses. But more so than many other towers, you’ve got to carefully consider where to place a fire tower. The fire comes out in a line that damages any monsters in the stream. The fire keeps coming out for a few seconds, and will continue to do damage to any monsters in the stream, but once it fires it will not change direction. This means that you’ll want to place the fire tower in such a way that its stream will hit as many monsters as possible. You should also never put fire towers right next to each other.

Upgrading fire towers is important, and it’s especially important that you get them to red as quickly as possible. The first upgrade from green to yellow increases the tower’s range, and the second upgrade from yellow to red increases the fire tower’s power, or damage. Going from red to purple increases the fire’s spread, and going from purple to black will give you extra range. Getting fire towers to the red level is critical, and the purple and black levels make it even better.

Ice Tower
Aah, the ice tower. If only Pixeljunk Monsters’s ice towers were as good as the freeze towers in Desktop Tower Defense. Alas, they are not. They don’t slow down enemies nearly as much as they should, and do close to no damage. As a result, the ice tower is easily the most useless tower in the game.

If you do use ice towers, focus on upgrading them to red as quickly as possible, since the first two upgrades increase the damage they do. The final two upgrades to purple and black only increase the spread, or area of effect.If you didn’t need to spend gems to unlock ice towers, I’d probably use them from time to time. As is, I never use them.

Laser Tower
The laser tower is at the same time one of the best towers in the game, and one of the most difficult to use well. Proper placement of laser towers is critical, because one of their greatest strengths is the ability to hit many monsters at once. Lasers have unlimited range. What? What’s that? Yes, let me say it again. Unlimited range. Laser towers will not fire until enemies come within their marked range, which is about the same as an anti-air tower. By itself, that’s good. But once it does fire, the beam continues to the end of the screen, hitting any flying monsters in its path, even if they’re all the way across the screen. So it’s critical to place the lasers in a location such that when they fire, they’re firing along a path of monsters, hitting as many as possible. If you place a laser tower poorly, it may fire across the line of monsters, hitting only one or two.

The laser tower’s first two upgrades are speed, which is good because the tower starts with a very slow rate of fire. The third upgrade to purple is range, which helps the tower fire earlier. The final upgrade is power, so it’s in your interest to fully upgrade the laser tower as quickly as possible.

Mortar Tower
At first, mortars may seem like no big deal, but in the end they’re just bigger cannons, and as such they do have a use. They’ve got great range, and the blast area of their explosions hits everything in a very large area. Upgrading a mortar is a bit of a mixed bag, as upgrading to yellow, red, or purple only increases the area of effect. But that final upgrade to black doubles the mortar’s speed, which is like having two mortars. Mortars aren’t as important as fire or laser towers, but they’re definitely useful in the right situation.

Tesla Tower
There seems to be a consensus in the online community that tesla towers are mostly useless. I’d like to disagree. In the right situation, I’ll use them in place of fire towers, and they do a good job. For example, in “Hard 1”, the level is constructed in a way that makes fire towers very difficult to use – it’s tough to place fire towers such that the flame will hit more than one monster at a time. But there are a number of places where two or three grouped tesla towers can wreak havoc when upgraded.

Tesla towers begin with a terribly short range, and usually must be upgraded to be useful. I’d suggest only upgrading them as much as you need to reach passing monsters, as every upgrade only increases range, and the fully upgraded range can sometimes be more than you need. There’s no point in spending gems so that you can reach forested areas where monsters can’t walk.

When fired, a tesla tower will attack every monster within range, which is fantastic. Not just enemies within an area like cannon or mortar towers, but every single monster it can reach. This is the power of a tesla tower. Once that range gets big enough, you can hit lots and lots of monsters at once.

Hive Tower
You can only build one hive tower on a level, but it can reach anything on the screen, including flying monsters. I’m not a big fan of the hive, primarily because it requires you to aim for it. The bees that fly out of the towers head directly for you, attacking any monsters along that path. In order to do acceptable damage, you really need to upgrade the tower fully.

The first two upgrades make the bees come out more quickly, and the second two increase damage. If you plan on using a hive, you really should upgrade it fully as quickly as you can.

So what exactly is a better solution than a hard drive? It seems likely that they’re working on a way to make downloaded games playable directly from a SD card. This way, you could move your copy of TV Show King or Ninja JaJaMaru-kun onto a flash card, and play it directly from the card without the hassle of having to copy the game back onto the Wii’s internal memory first.

Still, I’ve come up with some storage solutions that I think are a bit more creative. What’s better than a hard drive? Here are my ideas:

The Gigabyte Wiimote
Currently, you can store Miis on your Wii remote, and bring them to your friends’ houses, where you can use them while playing Wii Sports or transfer them into your friend’s Mii channel. But the classic Wii remote has very little memory. Introducing the Gigabyte Wiimote! Within this controller, you can store twice as much as you can in the Wii’s internal memory! All the data is transmitted by Bluetooth, and you can play games directly from the Wiimote.

USB 8-track storage

With the plug and play Wii 8-track storage peripheral, you can store your games on archival quality magnetic tape. Since it can read all 8 tracks simultaneously, it accesses data at a rate nearly ten times that of traditional tape drives! Plus, since all Wii 8-tracks are 100% recycled products, you’re helping to save the planet.

WiiFun Card
The WiiFun Card is a kind of virtual punch card. But forget the hassle of having to feed cards manually into a reader or of accidentally shuffling the cards. The WiiFun cards are completely virtual. In an idea inspired by the save system of old Castlevania games, you can now save data from any game on a WiiFun card, freeing up internal memory for more WiiWare. Just enter the punches on WiiWare cards with your Wii remote. Most game save files only require you to fill out 32 WiiFun cards, although certain WiiWare titles may require as many as 128.

Wiimote Ham’n’Cheese Attachment
My personal favorite is the edible device. Inspired by Valve’s sandvich, the Ham’n’Cheese add-on to the Wii remote is inexpensive and delicious.