Be Excellent To Each Other

Dude, I'm not talking about the normal mode with 50 levels, I've beaten that a few times. This is a specific mode with 100 levels which seems to be frigging impossible.

Let's make that tomorrows Thursday game, then.

Ok, to clarify then. Its the Fun mode with 10,000 Gold.

Its pretty awesome to be able to build several turrets to max power immediately, and you'll certainly breeze through the first 20-30 levels (so some good points to be had by sending waves early), but later it becomes apparent that the initial cash isn't enough to compensate for 50 more levels where the enemies keep getting harder and harder.

I keep getting to wave ~70. Bloody flying swines get me every time.

I had *five* fully upgraded air turrets in my last game, as well as plenty of fully upgraded squirts. It's that air wave at 77 that killed me. At the same time my ground turrets were starting to struggle badly with the regular bastards.

It doesn't seem to have the same scoring tally thing...

I got 8861, but I think you only get your 'early start' bonuses if you finish the damn thing (a shame, as I had over 4k in them!).

Wave 75 finished me off... stupid fast moving thingies...

For the record I had about eight fully upgraded air turrets, and the flying ones still got through.

EDIT: 9644... scuppered on Level 77. The difficulty curve is broken on this. Before Level 70 not a single thing had made it past halfway through my maze... then the fast Level around 75 or so... 16 got through, despite my maze being fairly even, so they doubled the difficulty in one level... dumb.

And yet, its beatable, apparently.

I am sure it is. I found out that making squares of a 'power up' box surrounded by fully powered up squirts and air turrets provided and excellent killzone. Next time I will make more of these. Also, I only used the power boxes, squirts, regulars and air turrets. Maybe the other towers are also useful. much experimentation to be had.

Though I'm only playing it since I'm stuck in the office until 7.

One fun thing with this version of the game, though, is that you can hit the 'next wave' button compulsively for the first fifty levels. I like sending about fifteen at once.

Lets get cracking then.

Can you save your scores to a group again?

I couldn't. Are we going to use screenshots or an honour system?

Not on the fun mode sadly, it'll have to be an honesty thing.

Although I've just been reading this thread and all of these people seem unfeisable hardcore, and most of them can't get past level 91. A couple get to levels 98 or 99 but it seems that very few people can crack the 100. Apparently its the air flyers in the later levels which are practically impossible to beat even if you convert your entire maze to air defense prior to those last waves.

Damn hard game.

I can get to the mid seventies, but that's it. Very hard indeed.

In a similar vein is this.

Quoth the raven, 404.

By taking some hints from the forum, I got to level 82, with score 10698.

The Boost towers are stackable, and boosted bash towers kick ass.

Stackable? As in one on top of the other for double the effect? Or just powered up? Or just having two side by side having an effect on the same bash tower?

I realised that they are quite nifty last time I played, but my maze was lopsided and the baddies from one side were given too easy a run through.

The reason I did that it is better to funnel one set of baddies through a little faster than the others, to give your towers more chance to hit things. My calculations were a mite off though.

Stackable in that you can get several to boost a given tower. I had a bash tower fully upgraded, with a 150% boost. I think it was causing about 10,000 damage a go. Funneling them into a bash chamber so that they get bashed, stunned and and then blatted by some powered up squirts whilst stunned seem to work fairly well. To deal with the later flyers I think you just have to have hundreds of swarm towers.

Yes, in non-serious games I've amusingly surrounded a single fully upgraded squirt with 8 fully upgraded boost towers. The damage is truly stupid, but as the levels of the 10k go on, it's just not the right tactic. One awesome turrent just isn't enough, even two or three. It's definitely a strategic puzzler.

Interestingly, in my go that got me to level 77, I didn't use a single bash tower. Perhaps this is where I'm going wrong. Decent bash's will stun creeps for a while, giving them more exposure to your powerful turrets. But at the same time, you need that cash for other stuff, like unfeisably powerful air turrets. etc. etc. and so it goes on

Just managed to beat the 3k-fixed challenge mode. £3k to put down an initial maze for the 50 levels, and after that you can't modify it at all. The only thing you can do is send waves early. Took about 4 attempts to crack it.

I did that one yesterday. Fluked it first time. More fun than that 10K mode.

I still always die on Level 77, which is the flying beasties (in the 10k mode). I need more swarm towers, but I spent all of my money on DEATH ALLEY, which is six of the big stompy towers (fully powered up) lined up in two rows of three, with two power up towers (fully powered up) behind them and squirt towers (fully powered up) in shooting over them all at the baddies too.

I had that right at the start, and until Level 70+, not one ground based baddie even got past that first part of my maze.

Alas, the flying creeps did.

*back to drawing board*

I had 17 - 17! fully upgraded anti-air towers in my last game and most of wave 77 still got through.

Did you connect any to power towers?

I also always get stung by upgrading too many towers to level 4, whereas level 5 is WAY more effective. I must learn to upgrade one tower at a time!

Or just not to play this stupid game!

Not this time.

Level 77 gets me every time. This game is like trying to crack a boulder with a pin-hammer. It's possible, but you need to find the precise spot and hit it with just the right amount of force. Hnng.

Awesome double-post to advise you to have a play with Armadillo Run, a bit old now, but it's charm is still there.

Okay, Thursday fans - here is Magic Pen - a clever physics game.
The winner will be the person with the lowest number of pieces used to complete all the levels. We'll trust scores you tell us, but if you get a remarkably low score a screenshot would probably help.

I was playing that yesterday and I was useless at it.

I can't do level six but in the first 5 levels I only used 9 shapes.

hmmm, I gave it a go, but I'm not feeling the love. Part of this is due to my work mouse being a shite, old rollerball with poor tracking.

I used 342.

I'll give that a go today, Grim....

BTW, is there a full verison of something similar to that Armadillo game available for no cash? It's ace.

EDIT - hmm. The pen game won't work as apparently my Active X controls are disabled - where do I go to switch them on?

Are you using IE? If so, is there a yellow bar at the top of your web browser?

I am, and no there isn't.

It's a work PC so things may be hidded or moved, I guess.

Chris, I have a full version of the game (I'm playing it right now, in fact), but I 'can't remember paying for it'. It's about 2.5mb though, so I could, in theory, send it to you. This is a theory of course, because I'd hate to engage in any form of piracy, or whatnot.

You should almost cerainly not send it to my AOL address, then. As that would be wrong. I would thank you most heartily for not doing so, too.

This is definitely not a link to the game. Only by working together can we stamp out piracy.

Now, that is a bit naughty, Mr Comical, as the poor chap who wrote it only wants £10.
Obviously I've got better things to do that wade through the hundreds of complaints I'll get if I do anything about it though, so carry on.

Pay me £2 a month if it makes you feel any better. I'll remove the link shortly

Gah, blocked at work. Thanks for not posting a link to it though, as that would have been naughty.

I have to say, it IS totally worth £10.

I may pay the chap some sponds then.

I think that's totally norty personally, even worse than trying to nick all the photos from that photo site. I shall have to record an angry mp3 of me saying why I think so, and then upload it somewhere that might eventually be trawled by http://www.torrentz.com

Making a point repeatedly doesn't make it more right or more likely to be listened to, you know. I think the target of your comments is well aware of your opinon and repetition isn't going to improve matters, is it?

Let's not have a piracy debate, my brain can't cope with it today. I generally respond by showing people my massive dvd collection, all genuine, bought after downloading the rips from the net. How else would I know if they were worth buying?

In my feeble defense I didn't download the original version, a friend did (true story), who then gave me a copy. Look see? I'm innocent, a lost, befuddled bystander.

I did recently buy bookworm adventures, because I HAD to see what happened when I got to the end of the free trial ;(

I don't know, sitting back confidently in the hope that sense wll prevail hasn't been serving me all that well. Besides, the target was Mr. Gnomes and his Stealing Everything On The Internet With Computers.

Just thinking about it, I do this a lot.

I downloaded C&C3, played it, completed it, then I bought it. I did the same for Civ4, and Dungeon Siege 2. In fact any game that I've ever downloaded and played for more than 10 minutes I've ended up buying as soon as I'd verified it being worthwhile. Same for films.

I suppose if someone wants to try and chuck the book at me for this method, they can, but they'd be lucky to catch me in the minimal timeframe between downloading and buying the game

For the record, I pirate shit all the TIME, y'all. Fuck yeah. I loves me getting up in that shit.

I also, such as yourself, frequently buy the things that I have initially pirated - usually that piracy being a result of tragic circumstances that maybe, just maybe, a nice long game of STALKER might fix. Which it did, so I bought it, and have been going on about it ever since!

Pirates are far from terrible people, being basically latter-day smugglers, who themselves were frequently among the first to sample new wonders, becoming taste-makers as a consequence. Hip importers/exporters. Enthusiastically talking up the excellence of some fine product that really everyone simply must try. Frequently stirring up markets in positive sweeps like this.

Hell, a site like 'American Soda' in the Fentimans thread, is damn near like piracy, it's simply that we live in a globalized age which has more 'enlightened' business ideals, and so changes were made to permit that sort of thing.

This is why a certain degree of piracy is tolerated, because the government (not in a capitalized scary way) is aware of this. It's the density of piracy ('the size of the black market') that has to be culled and contained.

Now stop stealing photographs and games and send me more Star Bars

Fatist.