Baud Attitude

I wasn’t really part of the Pokemon generation.  When the show started airing in Japan, I was living in Los Angeles which was home to several Japanese video stores, so I saw the first six or so episodes, bought some of the merchandise – let’s face it, them pokeymans is cute – and didn’t really pay much attention to the whole thing.

I also have never played any of the assorted Facebook games which revolve around making you wait to do things unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege of not waiting.

So, “Montowers ~Legend of Summoners~” is new to me in a couple of ways.  It is a no-holds-barred cash grab designed to make you sweat and grovel for tokens, earned ever so slowly through game play but conveniently available in bulk lots in the in-app store, and it revoles around the catching and raising of various monsters to do your bidding and fight for you.

Also it falls neatly into the category of games I HAVE played an awful lot of over the years, that being games designed to pander to the basest instincts of man.

I don’t usually write pic-heavy posts, but it is just so darned convenient to take screenshots on the iPhone, I can’t resist.  I warn you in advance.

The plot, as it were, of Montowers is that you’re a resident of a peaceful, bucolic land, just minding your own peaceful, bucolic business, when all of a sudden massive monster-filled towers pop right up out of the ground.  Like daisies!

Obviously, you can’t stand for this, so your next order of business is to storm these towers, killing or enslaving the occupants of each floor with an eye towards making your peaceful, bucolic land all peaceful and bucolic again.

In this pursuit, you are aided by a peaceful, bucolic, demonic assistant with the traditional fashion sense of demonic assistants throughout literature, to wit:

Oh, Japan.

Anyway, the basic gameplay of Montowers is pretty straightforward.  First, you fight a bunch of different monsters:

The actual combat is pretty simple and you don’t have a lot of input.  If you notice the little red area and the little golden circle up above?  Well, the little gold circle bounces back and forth and you have to tap the screen when it passes over the red area. If you hit it just right, your monsters get to attack before the other guy.

Defeating an enemy monster gets you experience and very occasionally potions or tokens.  If you’re lucky, you get to capture the monster you just fought.  Kind of.  What you actually capture is a “monster coin”, which can be turned into an actual monster through a summoning process which involves mining up raw materials and then hitting “summon” and waiting.

The cooler the monster, the longer the summoning time and the more raw materials you need to collect.  These raw materials, by the way, have their own respawn timer, so you’re waiting for ther materials to respawn so you can start the actual summoning timer.  So far, the longest summoning timer I’ve seen is 50 minutes.

These timers can, of course, be reduced or eliminated by spending tokens, which leads naturally to the aforementioned cash shop where you can load up for ever-so-reasonable fees.

Thankfully, all of these timers run in the background, even when you’re not playing, and the game integrates into the iOS notifications system – so you can, for instance, mine up all the available resources and then start summoning a monster from its coin, exit the game and eventually you’ll get a popup on the home screen telling you that you can mine for more stuff and collect your latest monster.

These same resources are used in increasing your monster’s level, which increases its attack rating and hit points – very useful stuff – and tends to either bolt on more and more protective armor – if it’s a male monster – or take said armor away if not.

Boy monsters:

I suppose, technically, a skeleton is about as gender-neutral as you can get, but I am classing it as a boy monster just because.

Girl Monsters:

I’m not actually griping about this, mind you.  I am firmly in the game’s target audience, after all.

The game supports the iPhone 4 retina display, so the art is all high resolution and pretty and stuff.  Sadly it’s not an iPad app as well, but I suppose it’s really designed more to be the thing you’re carrying with you and occasionally interact with when it makes your phone chirp and ask for attention.  Kind of like a tamagotchi, when you look at it like that, though it won’t actually starve to death and accuse you of being a bad parent.

In the final analysis, it is rather a satisfying experience.  Leveling up your monsters and blowing through the ever-more-difficult tower levels is fun and – thus far – not terribly stressful, and collecting the monsters as you catch them ticks all the appropriate checkboxes in the part of the brain that likes to put all of your DVDs in alphabetical order and has a set of 50 state quarters in a little blue book.

It’s very slow paced, of course, due to all the timers, but once you actually get a few monsters summoned and raised you can go and fight other monsters as much as you like – there aren’t any artificial lockouts there.  It’s not a social game, meaning that you’re not under pressure from your friends to pay-to-play more to catch up with them, so any buying of tokens is entirely dependent upon your own patience level.

I’d write more here, but I think my gathering timer is up.  Got to get back to catching them all.

A few years ago, upon the disturbing realization that I’d hand-imported a PSP from Japan just so I could have it in white, then bought a bunch of games for it that I hadn’t really played, I embarked upon what I called the PSP Appreciation Project, a rather fanciful way of saying “hey, I ought to play some of these games.”

My recent foray into tower defending, then, would mark the start of the iOS Games Appreciation Project, which is at least ten times cooler than the PSP Appreciation Project in that it has a better acronym.

Electronic Arts, for all that I’ve been harboring a 25-year-old-grudge against them, does put some effort into their iOS efforts, and – even better – seems to put them on sale regularly.  It’s how I came to own Mirror’s Edge for iPhone, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair but one with a surprising amount of style.

When the console version of Mirror’s Edge came out, in 2007 or so, it was a terrible seductive world, all stark white and splashes of red, scored with enthralling ambient music, wrapped in a promising story of fractured future utopias, and – for me, at least – mind-bogglingly difficult.  That is to say, I downloaded the demo, utterly failed to complete the demo, and put it aside as something I could never possibly appreciate.

The iPhone version has the same design style going on but, well, is something that I was actually able to play.  The shift in perspective from 1st-person to 3rd-person is, I think, largely responsible for that, though the frightfully intuitive touch controls help a lot.

At an hour or so to play through, it’s almost more tech demo than actual game, but you can always replay levels if you want to try collecting all the collectibles or going for speed runs.  Even if you don’t, it’s an hour that I found well worth the 99 cents.

I finished Fantasy Defense tonight, marking the first time that I’ve played a “serious” iOS game to completion, and I’m starting to see what the doomsayers are talking about when they question the future of dedicated gaming handhelds.  I spent about 15 highly enjoyable hours setting up my neat little rows of mages and archers and watching them turn a rogue’s gallery of fantasy villains into so much swiss cheese, which is more time than I’ve spent with either my PSP or DS since finishing Project Diva back in February of last year.

For the price – free, at the moment – , it’s hard to find any complaints with Fantasy Defense.  I will admit that it did crash a fair number of times while I was playing, but the levels are usually over in less than 10 minutes so it never gets too frustrating.

There IS s a bit of a difficulty spike right about the point where you hit level 40 (of 50).  This is probably where the developers would like you to drop some cash in the convenient in-app store to power up your units a bit, and I actually feel a little guilty that I never did.  I did have to spend a couple of hours near the end  of the game going back to earlier levels and grinding experience before I could actually beat some of the final levels, and dropping 99 cents on some in-game currency would have saved me those hours of grinding, but I’m slightly more proud because I stuck it out.

Oddly, when you DO beat the last level, your reward is a static screen with music playing and no way to get back to the application.  It’s not even a particularly attractive picture:

Now, I did point out in my last post that the developers kind of went over-the-top with the whole Heroic Anatomy thing, and it was therefore a little bit of a surprise to find out that they had, at some point, gotten just a little tiny bit of shame and decided to cover up their artwork JUST a little, most notably on the Ice Mage and Blaster units.

Here, for example, are the mage character portraits from in-game:

…and here are what appear to be the original character portraits.  Sorry about the low resolution on this but it does get things across.

Oh, Korea, what are we going to do with you?

Anyway, quite recommended, especially as it’s free and can be finished without giving in to the siren call of the in-game-item-store.

Several months ago, when the iPad 2 was released, I inherited my wife’s old iPad 1.

This is a pretty normal way for me to get hardware, by the way, through the hand-me-down process.  It’s a beautiful thing.

Anyway, I immediately loaded up all sorts of network management software on it and it’s made a great portable VNC device.

I bought some games for it, as well, but I really haven’t given any of them more than a cursory glance.  After all, when I have the iPad with me, I’m usually at home and have other things to do.  I have not yet, therefore, flung any birds or cut any ropes.

I did, however, stumble across a recommendation to try a tower defense game called “Fantasy Defense”, and this has become the first iPad game that I’ve put more than about 10 minutes into.  It’s only my third foray into the Tower Defense genre, mind you – I’ve played through Defense Grid: The Awakening and Plants Vs Zombies before, and quite enjoyed both, but not to the point where I felt the need to go looking for more games in the same mien.

Fantasy Defense is a Korean game and is, at least for the moment, available free of charge from the iTunes store.  There is, of course, a facility in the game where you can buy stuff, so that is presumably where they hope to make their fortune.

Specifically, they hope to make their fortune from impatient players, as the stuff you can buy from the in-app store all seems to be, at best, slightly more effective versions of stuff you can earn by playing the game.  Like, if you can buy a thingy that makes your hero 40% more effective with in-game currency, you can buy a thingy to make your hero 50% more effective with real money.  So far, anyway.

The gameplay isn’t anything too groundbreaking.  Monsters come out of portals and follow paths towards your base.  If enough of them reach your base, you die.  You get a limited supply of resources to start, these resources are used to place units and upgrade units, your units kill the monsters walking towards your base and you get more resources every time they kill a monster.

You can also place a single “hero” unit on every map, quite powerful and best placed at a choke-point.

I’ve only gotten through 5 of 50 maps, but so far it is wonderfully addictive and I foresee a fair bit of this game in my immediate future.

I do have one tiny quibble with the game, and that is that the characters are depicted as, err, heroic fantasy tropes turned up to eleven, and then turned up a couple more notches.

Take, for example, the “champion” hero.

I’m not sure what’s worse – the massive bejeweled codpiece or the take-your-own-eyes-out shoulderpads.

As bad as he is, the Archmage hero is, well…

I’m all FOR being pandered to, but this poor woman looks to have a medical condition.

The final hero, the bowmaster, is a little less over-the-top, in that her breasts are ONLY about the size of her head:

And sadly, even the grunt units suffer from a certain top-heaviness that could really stand to be dialed back a cup size or ten:

The monster design is a little more sensible, and I’m a fan:

Normally, when I see this sort of thing, I just have to kind of sigh, shrug, and say “oh, Japan, what are we going to do with you?”

I guess I’m going to have to extend that sentiment a little further west from now on.