Online Media Cultist

My man Jason over at Webomatica wrote about Desktop Tower Defense today, which reminded me that I continue to be obsessed with the Flash-based “casual” online game. Casual because it’s the kind of game you can understand pretty quickly (the idea is to set up little towers that shoot at and stop “creeps” who are trying to get from one side of your desktop to the other). So casual, yes. But obsessive. Oh yes.

I first learned about the DTD from TechCrunch, which to be fair warned me that once you start playing you can kiss a few good days goodbye. And the obsession is spreading with a relentlessness: a few months later TechCrunch reported that Desktop Tower Defense has been played 15 million times.

Now, that aside, let’s get down to the geekdom. This is how I attested to my current progress over on Webomatica:

I haven’t found dart towers to be all that useful. After a bunch of experimentation, I try to strategically deploy squirt towers around freeze towers and build them up to the highest level as quickly as possible. I didn’t bother with air defense towers for a while, but I think they were key in getting past the level 50 (on the 100 level challenge) and level 72 humps. I’m hitting a wall now around the level 80 mark.

Check out a speeded up takedown of all 100 levels here:

Update: I just watched the entire seven-minute clip – turns out that this player gets stomped right around the same point that I do, in the level 78-80 range!