Posts tagged with “GemCraft”

2009 was an awesome year for games! And we played a lot of them! Here’s a recap of the great games we played this year. If you haven’t tried them yet, now’s your chance! They are all FREE and just waiting for you to enjoy them.

Our year started off with a great little platformer called Eversion that has a scary twist (a retail version is in the works). We then laughed a ton while living out the Olympic dreams of QWOP. There were a few fun games in the Boston Global Game Jam, and The Redistricting Game taught us about how messed up our current electoral system is.

The Legend of Princess gave us a glimpse of what could have been a sequel to Zelda 2 (on the NES), and Dino Run ate up a bunch of our time as we ran away from Armageddon with our dinosaur brethren. Speaking of dinosaurs, have you checked out Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When They Roar yet? It’s a pivotal work in gaming. Gemcraft is an addicting little tower defense game with a fun chromatic twist, and Facade is an older game (2004 or 5, I think) but still a lot of fun to play today.

Effing Hail is a neat little flash game where you destroy buildings, airplanes, and satellites with hail, or if you are in a more constructive mood you can try building with Grow Cube. Don’t Eat the Mushroom (and Knytt Stories) is a hilarious game about what happens when you do (or don’t) eat the mushroom, and is a must play for any serious gamer. Finally this year we enjoyed racing through the apocalypse in Canabalt, and subsequently relaxed with the music of Auditorium.

These were all terrific games, if you haven’t tried them yet be sure to go play them all now!

Tower Defense has somehow become its own genre lately, and what an addicting genre it is. The games center around preventing enemies, or creeps, from traveling from thier source/spawnpoint to your sink/base by building upgradable, stationary attack towers. They also tend to have a terrific sense of flow, as it’s all you can do to keep up with the never-ending waves of enemies while building up your defenses. Because of the hightened sense of flow it’s easy to waste hours upon hours playing them, so be careful with this one.

You see, GemCraft is a highly polished TD game with distinct stages, a “level up” mechanic for improving your stats, and a much needed save function as the game is easily several hours long even if you’re good. The most interesting thing though is the importance of color. All weapons (gems) in the game have a hue value, and gems are especially effective against enemies of opposite hue. So an orange gem works well on blue enemies, and a green gem works nicely on red creeps. The game gets really good when you start “mixing” gems to make them more powerful and combine colors, bonus stats, and of course change the hue value. It’s hard to explain, but great once you start playing.

Be warned, the game is highly addictive.