Intermission: Bloons Tower Defence 4

Bloody hell, this is a long intermission.

Anyway, Bloons Tower Defence 4 has caught my eye. NinjaKiwi, the guys who made it, have always done good games. But I fear Mochigames, the guys they decided to integrate their game with, have screwed them over a bit.

For one, MohciGames is evil. Very evil. But we'll get to that later.

Bloons Tower Defence has always been a reasonable sort of game. It doesn't pull too many "dick moves", like having a special sort of balloon that can't be killed by anything else apart from one or two towers.

...ok, metal ballons. But frankly, if you didn't have a cannon tower by then you were doing something wrong anyway. And it tells you to get your act together and make one at least two levels before that stage anyway.

But Bloons Tower Defence 4 has got me a little worried.

There's this new balloon called a Camo Balloon. Camo Balloons can't be targeted, so all your towers are useless. Tacks and Mortar Towers are your only hope, but it doesn't specifically say that the Mortar Towers are good against Camo Towers, and I don't remember seeing much of a warning either, although that might be because I'm playing on a laptop and the team didn't design their game for a small screen.

But you won't spend any money on Mortar Towers because A) they've never been implemented before and you automatically distrust them and B) you have to aim them so there's a micromanagment issue.

So once you get to the stage where there are a ton of these guys, it's all over. It's just annoying that they can't be killed by anything else.

I can't help but think that these guys have a new fresh faced designer that thought a new balloon was a good idea. And it was. But maybe it shouldn't have been the Camo Balloon.

MochiGames, though. It has Mochicoins that you can use to upgrade your game. Which is super cool, until you realise that you need to pay for the bloody things.

With real money.

Screw that. I do not pay real currency for false currency. That'd be like buying gold for your character in WoW, but this time the Mochi team actually encourage it.

You know what would have been great? Giving me coins for activity on the site. Finishing levels in games could give me, say, 20 coins. It's nothing compared to what you could buy, but it's something little that, with a little more activity on the site, you could build up quite a lot in a reasonably short amount of time.

But maybe that's the point. These guys need to money through Mochicoins to pay for the site. Makes sense - these guys don't use ads on their site.

But so much of the game is for sale. In Bloons Tower Defence 4, you can "buy ranks", letting you access new towers early if you give them money. That's almost exactly like buying levels for your character in WoW; and what if Blizzard would let you do that? Well, it would take the fun out of the game. All you would need to do to get a character up to level 80 is, I don't know, a hundred or so dollars.

That means you get no experiance playing the character all the way up to 80, and thats a serious problem because, well, you don't know how to play it. You don't grow attached to your characters either, and you end up giving up because it's "too easy". Being forced to claw your way up means you get to see the world and get used to your character, and also get satasfaction out of doing so.

Yahtzee, in his Scribblenauts review, said the same:

...sometimes I get the urge for a grilled cheese sandwhich and after going through the trouble of digging the Breville out, chewing up my knuckles on a rusty cheese grater and finding that my special Brandston Pickle has solidified, the struggle makes it all the tastier. If I could just wave my hands and conjure not just a grilled cheese sandwhich but two grilled cheese sandwhiches, being worn as a bra by a swimsuit model constructed from grilled cheese sandwhiches, it'd take all satasfaction out of life.