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The movie is Aliens - the James Cameron action flick that spawned all sorts of video-game and cultural cliches. But it also spawned some interesting ideas in casual gaming. Consider this scene:

Ripley and the Marines are bunking down for the night in the terraform complex on LV-426. But first they have to secure the main medical centre in the complex from alien attack.

And this premise, creating defenses and destroying hordes of attacking creatures is the core of all Tower Defense genre games.

In Aliens, Ripley & Co. sealed doorways, mounted autoguns in strategic corridors, and basically looked for ways to take out as many of the little buggers as they could.

They carefully evaluate entrance and egress pathways and look for strategic mount-points that get the biggest bang for the buck. Sounds just like a Tower Defense style game, no? One or more entrance points, exit points or objectives...and your goal is to direct them into the most guns possible, eliminating them before they get to the exit.

On the iPhone, Tower Defense games are huge. They take full advantage of the hardware, aren't overly complex that you can't play one on a morning commute, or while on a coffee break. And, as the saying goes, they're easy to play, but hard to master.

Here's a look at a couple of leading Tower Defense games.

Fieldrunners
A great game and a great deal! From the developer:

Defend and control the field using a diverse selection of upgradeable towers in a limitless adventure, using a wide array of tactics and strategies against countless waves of unique land and air combatants! Hours of entertainment and replayable challenges! Enjoy a growing experience through free content updates! Do you have what it takes to dominate the fieldrunners and rise to the top as the ultimate Tower Defense master?

Fieldrunners has been on my iPhone touch for the last 8 months -- it was one of the first games I bought -- and it hasn't been deleted yet.

Earlier this week Fieldrunners was updated to include two new maps, OpenFeint and Facebook integration. Unfortunately, longtime owning fans aren't pleased with the pay/download required for the new maps. Upside is the social network integration.

geoDefense Swarm
My current favourite. This is more of an open-map concept than the previous geoDefense game. The previous game used fixed paths for the aliens (called creeps), which meant that you could eventually master a particular level by repeating it until you figured out the best strategy.

 

In geoDefense Swarm, creeps have pathfinding ability and some knowledge of the defenses you build. Replaying a level with a different defender layout results in a different challenge and outcome.

And, it looks darn good -- one of the better visually designed games.

These are the ones that I'm pretty keen on, but what have I missed. There are other Tower Defense style games out there, both for the iPhone and for other platforms, so tell me about your game.

Message Edited by bgrier on 12-29-2009 09:24 PM

Message Edited by bgrier on 12-29-2009 09:34 PM