Played a ton of Desktop Tower Defense yesterday.  If you haven’t seen it, “creeps” enter the field from the top and left of your screen, and try to leave via the bottom and right.  You place little towers to take them out, and stopping them earns you gold, which you can use to lay down more towers or upgrade the ones you have.
I survived all 49 levels earlier this morning, and I’ll share a little of what I know before I retire completely.  I’m not going to walk through each type of enemy, tower, and boss, but there are a couple of things I figured out that might help you.

First-level thinking (and you get past this if you read the “quick start”) is: let’s block their path!  If we make them take a long, circuitous path, then we have more time to sap their health.  There are lots of schools of thought on how to make the most effective labyrinth, but my first instinct was to build a quick, corner-to-corner wall, and make the enemy traverse the length and width of the field two or three times.  You can also create more dense, edge-to-edge walls, but the important thing is that you control their flow.
If you look at the boards of the top scorers, you’ll see that many of them never upgrade their pellet towers.  These cheapest towers in the game don’t really upgrade well, and I’ve had luck leaving them as level 1.  Not everything on the board has to be working for you if you are doing a good job of blocking.  As a matter of fact, you might see that some of the top boards have only six or seven fully upgraded towers, and a bunch of pellet towers.  Since the number of enemies is finite, so is your income, and as much as we’d like to have 20 maxed out squirt towers, there isn’t that much money in the game.  It’s surprising how well one frost tower and four squirt towers can cope.  On the other hand, I’ve seen a few boards with maxed-out pellet towers, but don’t get confused: a level 1 tower of any type is really just a wall once you hit the mid-game.  99% of your damage is going to be done by upgraded towers.
Different configurations have different strengths and weaknesses.  You might find that the second or third flying wave completely overpowers you, or maybe the immune waves go through too fast.  That might mean you’re relying too much on darts or frost towers.  The game definitely encourages balance, once you figure out the basic strategy.

Most of the top scorer boards don’t have a lot of air defense.  Anti-air towers only fire on flying targets, and they don’t do an amazing job of that.  They aren’t a great investment.  Squirters do a lot of air defense if you have them near the middle, and frost towers also work.  The flying boss is nearly impossible without some seriously upgraded anti-air, but if that boss goes through untouched, how much does it hurt you?  2 health.  That’s all.
Most top scorers have a single point of entry into a maze.  That means blocking the entry ways, so when 10 come from the left and 10 come from the top, they end up having to enter a narrow passageway at about the same time.  If you’re not using frost and darts, this doesn’t matter - the other tower types don’t have “splash”, or do damage to nearby enemies as they hit their target.  But a long stream of enemies can quickly become a bunched-up, slowed down, heavily damaged clot when you get them to show up in a long corridor together.

Once you figure that out, you realize that you’re not really building walls to keep your enemy from leaving, but to route them back to your main, upgraded weapons.  With the right layout, an enemy might have to walk in the range of a maxed-out dart tower five or six times before it finally gets a clear look at the exit.

This might be obvious, but upgrading takes time: specifically, downtime.  You have to upgrade sometime, but there are ways to optimize.  Dart towers are useless during flying waves, and frost towers are pointless during immune waves.  Beyond that, I try to upgrade one piece at a time.  Since you only have a handful of really useful towers, you don’t want half of them down for an upgrade at the same time.  Besides, having money for two upgrades at the same time means you didn’t upgrade when you could have done the first one, so you screwed up once already.  That money doesn’t earn interest.

I only rarely sent a wave in early.  I am pretty sure that you have to survive the game to have those bonus points count, and I don’t see the advantage.  There are levels that seem to end “early”, and you might jump ahead there, but it doesn’t happen a lot.  (Again, your enemies are your source of income, so jumping ahead is not really a serious disadvantage if your maze can take it, and if you can build out that fast.)

Another thing you might notice is that the top scores are littered with half-filled boards, and a smiley face or a signature at the bottom.  I imagine that these players have sold off their towers as they beat the last guy.  Selling towers is important at the beginning of the game: you get a pretty good price for your used towers, and you definitely don’t want to leave gaps where you’re planning future development.  Stick in a 5-gold pellet tower, reclaim your 3 gold when it’s time to sell, and don’t lament the 2 gold you lost.

Another strategy I never implemented: juggling.  If you’ve ever opened up a hole by accident while upgrading, you know that the enemy is always recalculating the optimal (shortest, not “least damage”) path to leave.  If you have him running down three long hallways and something changes in the maze so he’ll only have to run down two, he’ll backtrack to go through the hole you just made.  (If you haven’t played, note that it’s illegal to put down a tower that would actually prevent the enemy from leaving.)  It wouldn’t be hard to create a couple of key points in your maze where the sale of a tower here and the erection of another one somewhere else would result in a particularly nasty enemy backtracking as many times as you had gold to do it.  I imagine the game essentially comes down to this on “hard” and “challenging”.

Anyway, the strategy of this game is amazingly deep, and the “live action” aspect of it means that even the best strategies can be unsuccessfully implemented.  The masterstroke of the developers was to show off the boards of the best players: you can gain a ton of useful strategy information from reading these boards and seeing how people play it.  If you haven’t played, give it a shot and let me know how you like it.

Or so says Cratchit (who actually said I’m not much of a blogger “these days”, which allows us both to reflect on the glory days of blogging everything we bought, every cheese sandwich we ate, and every annoying person who ever stood in front of us in a line).

The truth of it all is that I am too much of a expectations-defying curmudgeon to really be in self-publishing. Tons of hits for cute kid stories? But I’m so much MORE than that. I am complicated. Can’t write anything else about kids until everyone else realizes how COMPLICATED I am. I will prove it, and then post more kid stories.

Okay, so here’s one: Becky wore a two-piece swimsuit for the first time the other day, and was jumping up and down from excitement, because she’d never worn a “zucchini” before. Zekini? Bikini, anyway, was what she was searching for. Christie gets very emotional about fixing these little English problems, because once they’re corrected, the kids never make that mistake again, and sometimes it seems like that’s all we ever get to keep of them. Stupid growing up.

And remember when I used to write stuff like this?

I played with the Wii on Saturday night. It is excellent and I am totally waiting for them to be actually available without waiting in line, because that’s about all it will take for me to get one. That could be because it’s the only next-gen system that’s not so hard-headed about HDTV (I don’t have one, and I’m not about to get one for video games), or maybe because they have actually done something interesting with the controller (making the whole experience a little more like being in an arcade). Whatever it is, it isn’t the internet-scribbling blog-cows who have been saying that “finally someone made a console that’s FUN, because this is about grown-ups having FUN and nothing else since the Atari has been about FUN”. If you haven’t had fun playing video games since 1985, then you’re irreparably DOING IT WRONG and should seriously consider going back to whatever else it was you were doing, if people still do that in 2006.

Yeah, those were the days.

Otherwise? My MacBook Pro is holding up pretty nicely. I need to register one of these text editors, but I’m not sure which one. Las Vegas was a blast: I hurt my feet walking around so much, but I did win the one tournament I entered, so it was financially successful. Beyond that, poker is good: barring a December collapse, I plan on paying taxes on $5000 in 2006 poker income. (That is gonna hurt.) And I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing for Christmas, despite the fact that I just sent an email out saying that the one thing we are not doing is staying up late Christmas Eve. (Which is a lot of fun, but for the next 12 years, my kids need to sleep, and sleep well, when I am not going to be at work the next day. True.)

I was in Bloomington for a meeting yesterday, and stopped by Best Buy on lunch.  (I love having hour-long lunches back again.  It’s the best.)

But if you’ve been there recently, they’ve moved everything around and they’ll only let you play PS2 on a little personal widescreen monitor.  Kinda funky.  But over in the corner I saw the XBOX360 display.  Cool.

I’ve been all excited for the new Nintendo system, since they’ve got a focus on fun games, and not USB headsets, polygon counts, media centers, or memory sticks.  I kind of like fun games.  All those other things… eh.  But XBOX360 kind of seems like it’s going in an inclusive direction as well: using those headets, you’ll be able to help someone else play games, through subscription stuff, there’ll be live online competitions, etc. etc.  Exciting.  If all this new hardware means there are more opportunities for casual gamers to be entertained and occasionally surprised, that’s great.

So I grabbed the controller (pretty - and well laid out) and loaded up the King Kong demo.  Sure, it’s a demo, but the game itself seems… well… stuck in the past.  A first person shooter where you don’t get a gun?  I jammed on buttons, trying to figure out something to do, and got a help menu button, a punch button, a crouch button… ah well.  Some numbnuts in a hat tried to open a door, screaming at me to distract the dinosaur.  Several times.  Then the dinosaur ate me.  To the next generation!

FOOTBALL PICKS!  FOOTBALL PICKS!

Observant reader "TR" points out that the football season starts tomorrow, and there’s no picks-related linkage yet.  Are you ready for picks?  I am!

Let’s do it on ESPN.com this year.  (I am so tired of Yahoo!… seriously.)  You can (probably) access the dnord.com picks group at ESPN.com by clicking that link, and if you need to create an ESPN.com account, you can do that, too.

You’ll need a password, and it’s "dnord". 

I’d also like to welcome our guest picker: Donovan McNabb’s mom, Soup Lady McNabb.  She comes with the group, and I can’t turn her off.  I heard she has a mean gambling problem, and bets heavily on quarterbacks with tight butts.  (Okay, enough mean talk about Soup Lady McNabb for now.)

Join!  Join!  Join!

When we went on vacation for a week, I didn’t bring my Game Boy Advance (mostly because I couldn’t find Pokemon Ruby, but still, I didn’t bring it): I printed off a dozen hard Sudoku puzzles and scratched through them during a few slow afternoons.  I was ready to share, but nobody took me up on it.

I found out about them through del.icio.us: some sites popped up in their popular list, and I checked them out from there.  But my dad saw me working on one and said "I really like those puzzles." 

"Oh yeah?  I brought more…"

"Nah, I’m reading.  Thanks."

But then my grandma saw my stash of them, and said "is this that number puzzle they have in the paper now?"

"It’s in the Minneapolis paper?  Wow.  I found it on the internet, but I’d heard it was gaining popularity all over the world–"

"Yeah, it replaced the bridge column."

Gulp.  They took my grandma’s bridge column away.  I told her it probably would have been converted to a no-limit hold ‘em column in a few years anyway ("You’re short stacked with $500 after paying the big blind of $100, holding pocket tens, and the small blind raises you all-in.  Discuss."), so no big loss, but still, that’s kind of a bummer.

My lineup with the Rotten Dead Pool has expired, since my picks were made 13 months ago, and they only play for one year.  It was a great year, with Reagan, the Pope… but a few surprises!

While you could follow along with my 2005-06 picks, you could also match wits with your webmaster and pick some yourself.  I’m joining for August 1, so go ahead, make your picks, and leave your username here as a comment.  I’ll try to follow everyone’s picks and track the scoreboard here, and then in a year we’ll know who has their finger on Death’s pulse.

Speaking of matching wits with the webmaster, if you want to download PokerStars, there’s been interest from a few people for a every-few-weeks meetup in a fake-money room, with maybe some Skype thrown in for fun.  (That means not real money, just hanging out.)  If you’re one of those people, let me know.  If you already have it, my name on there is "dnord520".

Due to overwhelming demand (Tim saying he liked it, and Jer saying he’d actually write something this time), I’ll relaunch D-PAD, in place, sometime this week.  (Also, I think there’s some cool stuff in MT/TP geared towards collaborative publishing, and this effort is reconnecting me with some of the reasons I do this in the first place.  So much for spending less time on this site, eh?)

Listening to DJ Shadow’s "Changeling", I’m reminded of Quake, and how I used to listen to "Endtroducing" incessantly while I played it.  Thinking back, most of my FPS / PC gaming binges have been supported by albums-of-the-moment, and so here they are:

1994 (spring) - Civilization and Ween, Pure Guava

1995 (summer) - XCom and Rocket From the Crypt, All Systems Go!

1996 - Quake and DJ Shadow, with some Urge Overkill thrown in there too

1997 (spring) - Diablo and a stack of CDs I’d picked up from Cheapo: Ice Cube, The Predator; Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Let’s Face It; Beck, Stereopathetic Soul Manure; Imperial Teen, Seasick

1998 (fall) - Half-Life (no CD - the audio was too intense, and you couldn’t turn it down or you’d miss something awesome)

2000 - Unreal and Fantomas, S/T (I really hadn’t cared at all for this CD before this, but I thought the sort of disjointed ambience of it would be sort of copacetic, and it turned out to be just right.)

2001 - Max Payne and System of a Down, Toxicity; also Jay-Z, Blueprint

2002 - Battlefield 1942 and Isis, Oceanic

Yeah, now The Onion’s AV Club is getting in on the video game review biz.  (It’s harder than it looks.)  They write fairly well, and if their choice of Winning Eleven 8 is any sign of their priorities, they’ll stay fresh.

(Winning Eleven is a soccer sim that competes with EA’s much more well-funded soccer games.  It’s widely acknowledged as more complete, more realistic, more fun, and more deep than EA’s game, which is really saying something.  I just found it had come to America today at Target, where it was on the PS2 demo machine.)