If you like a noisy system, get the 360. The PS3 is practically silent, whereas people who get the 360 identify other 360 owners by seeing their houses shake and watching the police tell them to stop jackhammering at 3am. Besides, the 360 puts out so much heat that I think it may be solely responsible for global climate change.

By looks alone, you’d probably guess the PS3 is about ten years newer than the Xbox 360 or else alien technology. If they painted the gray bits black, it would look like Darth Vader’s game system.

The controllers are incredibly light. If you’re lucky, they might just bounce off your brand new big screen LCD when you get mad and throw them. Just be sure to record the video, so you can put it on YouTube and have all the 12-year-olds leave comments that even single-celled organisms think are stupid.

Online options? It costs extra money to do all the wonderful online stuff on the 360 (not to mention that you may end up having to buy the wireless adapter instead of it being built in). Some people have said that charge creates a bit of a barrier, so you have a higher quality service. Honestly, I haven’t played any games online on either system, so I don’t know how true that is. Of course, either way you’re going to end up with spoiled kids whose 12-year-old voices are so high pitched you can barely hear them. Fortunately, you won’t hear the parents in the background because they’re in some other room ignoring their children and posting online about how video games have ruined their kids. Getting demos on either system is easy though.

In the end, it largely comes down to games. This is the part that calls out to all the flamers to type in all caps about how “X game is better than Y game because Z irrelevant reason.” For instance, Gears of War 2 (360) is considered a great game. I thought it was an example of a technically good game (graphics are great, cover system works well, etc.), that just didn’t thrill me. It was fun but not incredible. The storyline was disjointed and actually pretty dumb in a lot of spots. Yeah, I know, first-person shooter means you don’t need a good storyline, but if you’re going to have a stupid storyline, put it in the background like in Doom and the classics. Anyway, it’s probably the best game ever to a lot of people. The same might be the case with Killzone 2 (PS3). For me, it’s cool but not awesome. In fact, Resistance: Fall of Man (the original one, which comes with some new PS3s) is more fun to me. I haven’t had enough time to really explore the library of games available for either system, but it seems like you can find enough good games to overspend on either system with games as expensive as they are.

Obviously, I’ve already got a heavy bias toward the PS3 after just a week of using it. Each system has some advantages over the other, but the PS3 is clearly a better system, in my opinion (and I sure hope you don’t come to my blog looking for someone else’s opinion).

Well, my brother’s Xbox 360 red-ringed, and it’s only been a bit under a month since I wrote about how much the xbox sucks. There isn’t much to say other than that the quality of these systems is seriously lacking.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time my brother has had problems. His original Xbox 360 red-ringed, and he sent it in for repairs. They sent him someone else’s refurbished one…. with the wrong region code. The whole thing was a huge hassle, and red-ringing again isn’t exactly a good sign.

I’m just glad it didn’t catch on fire and burn up my TV.

I’ve personally leaned toward the PS3 for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t until the past week or two that I really saw the problems with the Xbox. Now, everyone has a horror story about the Xbox 360 red ring problems, so I won’t bother with any detail about that. My brother had that problem and had to send his system in. Microsoft sent him a refurbished system from the wrong region, so he couldn’t use anything that was regionally coded. It got more complicated than that, but I’ll keep this to my limited week-and-a-half of exposure.

The first problem I saw was with Rainbow Six Vegas 2. It worked fine for a few days and was a damn fun game, and then it suddenly quit working. Partway through the initial loading was a screen that said something along the lines of “Game experience may vary online,” and it froze at that point. In fact, it froze hard enough that the controllers quit responding, and the power button on the console had to be used. Since my brother had recently bought that game used, he took it back to the store and got an exchange. The new (used) copy loaded through the main screen fine, but it would come up with an “Xbox can’t read this disk” error about one second after the main menu had loaded. If you were really fast, you could select your choices and have it hard freeze instead. So, you can either blame this on the system, or you can blame it on a disk magically going bad (since it wasn’t removed from the system from the days it worked to when it quit) and a bad replacement. Honestly, I’m not sure.

There have been some other hardware-related issues, but I have also noticed bugs in pretty much every game I’ve played. Here’s a screenshot from Mass Effect (sorry about the crummy one-in-the-morning camera phone shot):

I created a character and got just about to the actual start of the game when I went to an undefined menu that froze the game (but not the system, this time). Programmers will recognize some of the possible reasons for this, but in the end they don’t matter. It only matters that I wasted time created a custom guy and then lost everything because of a bug. At least I had only just started, but it didn’t exactly make me excited about the game.

I also tried Forza 2 Motorsport, which was relatively fun. It wasn’t awesome, but it was a decent game. Or, it was until one of the computer cars decided to ram into me because I was going down the straight on the correct racing line. Apparently that car hit me hard enough to make me sink into a hole.

I guess I ought to be a game tester because I seem to find bugs extremely quickly. Really, the system is pretty fun, but I keep seeing usability issues that surprise me. Most of them revolve around accessing system settings/options and having it disrupt game play, but those kinds of things could be ignored, assuming there weren’t so many other problems.

Yeah, a PlayStation 3 sounds like a pretty good system now. Well, one of the thirty versions of it does anyway.

#5 – Flash Circle TD

The major difference between this game and other TD games is that this one does not end after a certain number of enemies go past. Instead, this ends when there are too many “creeps” on the screen (100 or 80, depending on difficulty level). I didn’t feel like tower upgrades were as effective as they should have been. Other TD games usually make it clear that upgrades are more beneficial than a large number of weak towers, but I wasn’t so sure in this game. The sound effects are rather repetitive, so you might want to just mute them and use your own music.

#4 – Desktop Tower Defense 1.5

This one features extremely simple graphics and a slightly different idea. Rather than having a path you must bombard, you need to force the enemy along a path using your towers. Combining cheap towers to fill in the path with strong towers to deal the damage is the best way to approach this. If you just try to put a bunch of towers around randomly, you’ll quickly find the enemy blowing past.

#3 – Bloons Tower Defense

I first reviewed this game back in August. In that review, I basically said this game is addictive, and it is. This is probably one of the simplest ideas for a TD game, but something about that simplicity is just fun. All you have to do is pop the balloons, but soon you’ll encounter massive amounts of extremely fast balloons that pop to reveal more balloons inside. The super monkey is one of the most satisfying towers in any of these games. Like many of the TD games, this one suffers from repetitive sound effects.

#2 – Vector Tower Defense

As you can tell from the screenshot, this TD game has graphics that are quite a bit different from normal. The towers are also a little different from the typical TD layout (e.g., general purpose tower, fast tower, air tower, etc.). Each color is slightly different, but they also do different amounts of damage depending on what color they are attacking. You also have complete control over each wave of enemy units, so you can strategize as much as you want. I did a slightly more detailed review previously.

#1 – Onslaught 2.1

The best tower defense game seems to be Onslaught at this point. It has what is expected in a TD game, but it also has several nice features. The ability to upgrade specific stats on towers is something I’ve wanted in other games for quite some time and Onslaught has that. You can upgrade power, range, and rate individually. It also has combos in which two (or more) towers that are maxed out on power can combine to create a more powerful effect. Combine a missile turret with two gun turrets and you get nukes. Combine missiles and lasers and get (as you can probably guess) missiles that shoot lasers. There are a lot of combos, so it’s a good idea to be aware of them before you start.

Another awesome feature of this game is the sheer number of keyboard commands. You can upgrade with the “q,” “w,” and “e” keys (for power, range, and rate, respectively) and you can combine those with shift to upgrade as much as you can afford. Of course, you don’t have to use the keyboard, but it will definitely make you a much faster player.

The graphics are also good, but the game does quickly become ridiculous as the screen filles with enemies, rockets, bullets, lasers, etc. Chances are, your computer will slow down so you’ll probably have to lower the quality once the screen starts filling up. This is one of the big weaknesses of flash, so you can’t blame it on the game too much.

Other Mentions
Turret Defense – Create turrets on the side of the road to destroy incoming enemies. This one has simple graphics with a semi-C&C theme.
Tower Defence by Roman Sanin – Runs quickly because the graphics are extremely simple. This one is probably only worth it if your computer can’t handle the better TD games.
Toytown Tower Defense – Check this one out if you want a unique experience. The map is large and you also have a “hero” that you can use to help defend. You also have to worry about power rather than just money.
Tower Defense (.org) – If I had found this site earlier, I probably wouldn’t have time to post this because I would be playing the collection of TD games here.

The various towers are one of four colors, each being strong against a color and weak against a different color, but they also use very different attacks. Some shoot single lasers continuously. Some shoot missiles. Some suck energy from their target to use against it. I recommend loading up on the weakest of the blue towers, because they can slow down several enemies at once, but be sure to have some heavy damage dealers (I prefer the strongest of the red towers) to take out those slow targets.

Don’t play Bloons Tower Defense if you have little time to spare. It’s addictive! The objective is to pop the balloons (bloons) as they go along the path. You build towers (between rounds or during rounds) that attack the bloons. The cheapest tower is a monkey that slowly throws darts at nearby bloons, but you can upgrade it to have a longer range and a piercing dart that can pop two bloons with one hit. The ultimate tower is pretty much a monkey on speed. He twitches wildly as he throws darts at superhuman (or supermonkey) speeds.

The graphics are fairly simple, looking similar to a board game, and the game’s concept is very easy to grasp. Just watch out, because the bloons become faster and take multiple hits (black bloons pop into two yellow ones, which each take a few more hits to pop). Fortunately, there are only 50 levels, or I’d probably not be posting on the blog for quite a while…. Give it a try!

Various planets, moons, and asteroids are simply referred to as “astros” (hence the name of the game) for simplicity. Each type has a specific advantage (for example, crystalline planets can generate income very quickly), and each level of orbit changes the stats for the planet (e.g., if a planet is close to the sun, it will have a higher level of solar energy). Like just about every feature of the game, you don’t have to pay attention to these details. You can simply read the stats on each planet.

The screenshot is of the normal astro overview page, which also shows all the structures you have (I cut them out of the screenshot to keep it from being too large). I removed the coordinates on each of the screenshots, so that’s why the location section looks strange. You can see the capability of the planet and what fleets are there. If one of your fleets (or one of a guild-mate’s fleets) is incoming, you can see how long until it arrives. If the fleet does not belong to you or your guild, you can only see the fleet when it is within a certain distance (that distance is actually the fleet size in seconds, so a fleet of 60 can be seen one minute before it arrives).

Since there are so many different types of structures, they all tell you exactly what they do underneath (e.g., “Upgrade increases Base Energy output by 10″). You can go as in-depth with the game as you’d like. For instance, after building one structure, the cost of the next level of that structure will go up 50%. So, you could build an antimatter plant for 3000, knowing the next one will cost 4500, or you could just build the first one and the game will tell you what the next one costs.

Combat is fairly straightforward. Each unit has attack power, armor, and possibly shields. If a unit does 10 damage to another unit with 10 armor, that unit would be destroyed. Shields cut down the damage to just 1%, so if that unit had a shield rating of 2, 8 damage would go through, and 2 of it would be reduced to just .02, doing a total of 8.02 damage. Fortunately, you really don’t have to pay that much attention. You can build everything from a fighter to a death star and throw as much (or as little) as you want at your enemies. The fleets that are destroyed are turned into debris, which can be recycled to recover some of the cost of those ships. People tend to think they “own” a debris field if they were part of the combat, so don’t steal anyone’s debris if you don’t want to make enemies.

You can choose not to attack other people, but there are also computer “players” that you can attack instead. Players cannot attack you during your first 7 days, so you have a chance to figure out the game. After that, a player has to be within 10 levels of you to be able to attack you. Even if someone does attack you and overtake your astro, you don’t lose it. Your construction capability and income from that planet is reduced, but you retain control and do not lose any structures. This gives you the chance to mount a counterattack and to continue building up the planet.

The game is completely free. You start out with an upgraded account for your first week, so that you can test out some of the paid features, but after that time expires, you can continue to play with a free account. With a free account, you can build up to nine astros and 5 levels of each type of advanced structure (such as multi-level platforms, which give you more area to build). The upgraded account gives you access to extra features, such as the scanner.

As I mentioned before, you can see the incoming fleets at planets by viewing that planet. If a fleet is within a certain distance (again, the fleet size in seconds), you can see that fleet. It’s pretty tedious to try to check every planet, so the scanner allows your to see those reports all on one screen. This lets you quickly tell if someone is coming toward any of your planets or if there are large fleet movements in the region. If you don’t have an upgraded account, you’ll simply see a message letting you know that you don’t have access to that feature.

The upgraded account also lets you queue up to 5 items rather than 2, which can help for those times when you want a lot to happen while you are away. You can also easily view what structures each planet has all on one screen with an upgraded account.

There are multiple servers, but I only play on the Alpha Server now. With any server, I’d recommend joining a guild as soon as you can. You’ll find useful help and receive protection from a guild. Each one has different rules, so be sure to make sure you agree to their rules (some don’t allow you to attack people, some allow you to attack guildless, etc.).

This game is continually evolving, so new features are constantly being added. You can also use a “graphics pack” to make the game look different. View your account page and the forum for more info.

BowMaster
You start out with a simple bow and arrow, dragging the mouse back to control the angle and strength of your attack as you defend against various enemies who march or fly toward your castle. As you kill them, you gain points that you can spend on all kinds of different upgrades. You can buy fire arrows, ice arrows, archers who auto-attack for you, and quite a few other things, or you can spend your money on upgrades that allow you to fire faster, do more damage, shoot your arrows farther, or plenty of other options.

GunMaster
Here you are, a soldier too homocidal to leave the screen where constant bad guys rush in or parachute in trying to kill you. Kill them first! You aim with the mouse cursor in 360 degrees but you move with the keyboard (standard “wasd” movement). You also have poximity mines and grenades with which to blow up your enemies. If you couldn’t tell the relationship between this game and BowMaster, maybe you will figure it out when you switch to exploding arrows, which are fired in the same way as the arrows of BowMaster. For some added entertainment, pay close attention to the way the characters’ arms flail around, especially when hit with an explosive.

Defend Your Base
This game is similar to BowMaster in that you are defending a base, killing the bad guys, and upgrading after each round. Here you have a gun and click where you want it to fire. Early on, it will take two shots to kill each of the normal stick men who rush you, but you can upgrade your weapon. You can also increase your clip size (you have to reload when you use up your magazine by pressing spacebar), upgrade your wall, hire a gunman, and a few other options. Early on, I suggest double-clicking the enemies and reloading as often as possible. This game can become pretty hectic after just a few rounds when your base is being rushed by a screen-load of stickmen.

POOM!
If you want a break from all the violent games above, you should check out this one. All you have to do is bounce a ball back up into the air with your tiles. Sounds simple, but each bounce randomly changes the layout of your tiles and what kinds of tiles they are. Regular tiles bounce the ball a little lower than all the way to the height of its drop. Springy tiles will make it go higher, but some tiles simply break. It’s a bit tricky since the game is 3D, but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. Just don’t expect to master it early on.

Heli Attack 2
Oh okay, another violent game… All you have to do is blow up the helicopters, but the game has the added twist of a time distortion (slow-mo by pressing Shift), HypderJump (jump really high by pressing control), and various power-up weapons that drop down (switch with the End key). Since you control your character with the arrow keys, the controls aren’t too strange on most keyboards. There is limited terrain, but you can scroll a few screens over. Hold down the mouse button for automatic firing.

Hopefully that is enough to keep you entertained for a while!

Anything that is free is good. Well, that’s not entirely true. A lot of free things really suck, including online games, so I thought I would post about a few of the online simulation games that I have enjoyed. With these kinds of games, the player doesn’t “control” a character like in a typical game, but, rather, the player makes choices that will affect the outcome based on strategy. I’ll probably post on more action-oriented games (i.e., flash games) in the near future.

BatRacer
Previously, I had talked about BatRacer, a free, online racing simulation. You can enter various leagues (F1 2006, Supercars, etc.) and attempt to optimally tune your car. Some leagues have teams and some do not. You attempt practice runs on the track and adjust the car according to the feedback you receive. You can have your driver race harder, potentially having more feedback as the car is pushed to the limits, or the driver could wreck the car and you will enter the race with an untuned vehicle. You also control your driver’s choices for the race, but you set them before the race. For instance, you can say what tires to use, how hard it has to rain before he switches tires, when to pit, if he should pit during a caution, etc. It can take a bit to get the hang of it, but the game is fun. Overall, it’s an investment of about 5 minutes per day.

CyberNations
A game I’ve been playing regularly for almost a month now is CyberNations. Obviously, since I am playing it, this game is free as well. You create a nation and simulate control over it. You can choose to be aggressive or defensive. In a way it is like a nation-version of SimCity. Your income is based largely on population happiness, but your goal is to make money (and spend it on your nation in order to grow stronger), so sometimes it is generally better to tax your citizens heavily rather than being a nice ruler (who ever heard of one of those anyway?). You start out with a tiny section of land and only a few followers, but you gain land, infrastructure, technology, and more as you go. With a higher technology you can buy tanks, cruise missiles, even nuclear weapons. You can join an alliance for strength in numbers or you can go solo. The game is very fun, but it takes a little bit to get the hang of it. Be sure to read the wiki to help ensure your money is spent correctly (e.g. don’t save up and buy technology, focus on infrastructure in the beginning). This game can be anywhere from 10 minutes a day to as long as you want to spend on it. I would say, once you get the hang of it, it will generally be around 15 minutes, but it can vary quite a bit.

AstroEmpires
The game I’ve started most recently is called Astro Empires (see the more detailed post about AstroEmpires). I’ve only been playing it for a few days, so I can’t say how great it is yet, but it is interesting so far. This one is different from the previous two games in that the game is continuously running. You start out with a colony on one planet and you build structures and research technology in order to improve and expand your control. Each thing that you build or research takes a certain amount of time. You can actually watch the clock tick down until you can do something else. Each building costs an amount of credits, takes energy, and requires citizens to run, so you can’t just sit there waiting for the timer to run out. You have to plan out what is most important (economy? technology? expansion?) and spend accordingly. So far the game is cool, but it does look like more of a time commitment than the others. It’s also a fairly new game, so documentation is a bit limited.

There are several leagues (F1, V8 Supercars, Champ cars, etc.) and everything is free. It’s about a five minute commitment per day for each league you join, so it’s a great break from work. You can also join teams, play with or against a friend (or friends), and even create private games. If you have a few dollars, you unlock several additional features, but none of them are necessary to compete or have fun (but they can help!). If you run into me out there, let me know.