Flash Tactics
Before I get into my topic for today I’ve got something to share. For the past few months I’ve been telling you that the Rolemonkeys podcast is a great source of entertainment. Well it is even more than that. This past week I was lucky enough to be the winner of a contest they held. I won game books to the M-Force game, which was the game they were playing at the time, and they even threw in a $30 gift card to Geeklabel.com (ding!). (For more on the Geeklabel guys I recommend the Geeklabel Radio Podcast.) So you see, the Rolemonkeys are not just a great listen but you might win some gaming swag, and that’s always a good thing. Thank You Mick, Chris, Max, Clay, and Mark, as well as a big thank you to Hex Games and Geeklabel.
Now onto the main topic!
I’d wager that every single one of us has wasted a little time during work playing Flash games. Heck when I was working Tech Support on Sunday mornings I would spend hours playing time wasters like Bejeweled while waiting for phone calls. These games had no purpose save giving us something pretty to look at while killing time. Maybe I was predisposed to them from years of Tetris play. I played a lot of Tetris, and Welltris, the computer kind. I was never good at the joystick version. I also had to play the escalating variety. I had a version that progressed to a tenth stage speed but never got faster. I could and did pay that for hours at a time. Ah… wasted youth. Nowadays there are hundreds of Flash games available for free on the internet. Unfortunately I’ve found that few of the puzzle games are that good. (Aquacubes? *shudder*) However there are some great strategy games to make up for it. Recently I’ve been playing 3 games that a friend of mine recommended to me over the past month. They are all from the MoFunZone.com site.
The first is called Tactics 100. In this game you assemble a force of units to take thru 10 levels of opponents. It is a simple chess board, turn based combat system. The reason this game is great is the way you get to build your army. You get to customize not only which units you want to take, choosing from Knights, Wizards, Archers, and Healers, but you get to customize their
abilities. You get 100 points to buy an army. You can spread it over as many as 8 relatively weak units or on as few as 2 very strong units. I had a lot of fun trying out different combinations of units, but I have to say now that the wizards are my faves. It also apparently has some kind of live multiplayer support but I haven’t tried it. I assume that it would require me to join something.
The second game is called Flash Element TD. It says that it was inspired by both Starcraft and Warcraft so it at least has a good pedigree. This game gives you a map to defend with various towers as waves of monsters run thru. It has an interesting mechanic where 
you collect interest on you gold between waves of monsters so you are encouraged to defend the territory with the minimalist units possible. This fame was very cool but now I just play it to ply the last board. All the regular boards and the 3 bonus boards are all pretty routine now. It’s just the “How are you still alive” board that I can’t beat. I still try every now and then but mostly I am playing…..
Xeno Tactic. This game is so cool. Again you are defending territory from invaders except this time the space is empty and you have to use your cheapest gun emplacements to make walls to keep the aliens from just running across the board. This game does a good job of training new players. It has 6 separate missions each harder then the last. You must complete the lesser ones before moving on to the harder ones. I cannot beat stage 6. I keep trying but it is nigh impossible. Often I know I’ve lost the board by the 6th wave of aliens. In mission 6 you need to survive 100 waves. On the bright side, if I lose that early I don’t waste too much time playing this game. Missions 5 and 6 can take a significant amount of real time to finish. I may have an 
inflated view of this however because this game lags a lot on my system. It may be hardware related but I suspect that it is probably because I am usually listening to iTunes when playing and iTunes is a bit of a resource hog. Even with the lag this is still worth playing. One of the hardest parts of Xeno Tactics is balancing air defense with ground defense. Only 1 in every 7 waves is an aerial attack, but as they can fly over all your gun emplacements they fly unhindered across the board. This can be devastating if you are too focused on stopping ground units.
I hope that if you give these games a try you enjoy them as much as I did. Also if you have any suggestions for favorite free online games out there please let me know. I’d love to try them out.