After playing a video game with Dave over the weekend, I decided that I should have a copy of my own to play at home. So I actually bought a war chest edition of Warcraft III for the PC. Anyone who knows my history with video games should know that this is probably not a good thing.
It took much fiddling to get it to work. For some reason the videos won’t play on my system. After searching for hours on the support forums and third-party sites, I finally found a suggestion to rename the video directory so that the game couldn’t find them. I did so, and now everything works fine.
It also took me a while to find a good site with scenarios in it. In Warcraft you can play the regular campaign game or custom-made scenarios. The scenario I played with Dave was custom-made.
Apparently, there’s a whole subset of game inside Warcraft called “Tower Defense”. Rather than the typical Warcraft-style harvesting of raw materials and building buildings that spawn more drones and soldiers, you have a very different setup.
Basically, you start with a little bit of money (gold) and you spend it on towers. The towers don’t move and don’t do anything but attack enemies that approach them. Enemies spawn from spawn points and run toward an exit point on the map. It’s your job to prevent the monsters from reaching that exit point by placing enough towers in their way that they are all shot down en-route. The strategy of the game seems to have evolved from an AI glitch.
You can’t simply place towers to block the monsters because then they’ll attack the towers and they will be destroyed. Instead, you arrange the towers in a maze-like pattern so that although the monsters can path-find their way through (thus leaving your structures intact), they’re in the path of fire of the highest concentration of tower weaponry.
As you kill off monsters you get gold, and you spend the gold on more towers or more powerful towers. The version of the scenario I’ve been playing allows you to “upgrade” certain types of towers to make them stronger. This is essential because the enemies get tougher as wave after wave of beast hits your mazes.
I’ve played the game at home three times. The first time, Abby played with me. When she finally got sick of sitting in my lap and watching, she got up. When I turned back to the screen, a wave of flying mature blue dragons was making its way toward the exit, and simply flew by everything that I had standing on the map. I didn’t make that mistake again.
I won the scenario the other two times I played, and the last time I played I only let through 9 of the enemies. These particular enemies were grossly beyond the power of anything else I had seen until then. I was horridly overmatched and barely put a scratch into any of them as they walked by.
In all, it’s been a fun game. I don’t know if I’ll even play the basic Warcraft game because I don’t know that I’m interested in the realtime strategy of collecting resources and whatnot. I might download a few more scenarios for Tower Defense to see how I like those, if I can find a good source site for them.
