Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Gmail And Other Email Account Integration

Published
by
icarus
on June 29, 2007
in News
. 0 Comments

Just found out today that you can have Gmail check other email accounts of yours, so now I can have Gmail getting my Paradoxinc emails. There are several nice options with it that make it very useful and flexible to your needs. It can grab the message and keep it on the original server or delete it since you now have a copy of it in your Gmail account, or leave it on the other server if that is your preference.

You can also send emails from Gmail using different email addresses, which makes it easier for others to keep track of what email to use. So from Gmail I can send out emails as icarus.lnx@gmail.com or sellis@gmail.com in one place.

It also apparently runs the spam filter on it too so you can take advantage of that. I’m sure this has been available for a while but I thought it is very cool that I can use one webmail system for all my personal email needs, and with a 2870 MB limit I think that will go very far with me!

Tower Defense Games

Published
by
icarus
on June 4, 2007
in Games
. 0 Comments

Here’s a List of (what I think) are the best Tower Defense games I’ve found scouring the internet.

By far my favorite is DesktopTD where it takes place on a typical office desk and has a lot of different game types to keep it fresh. Also it has a very well done score board where you can track your own personal scores or even make a group for you and your friend to judge separately from the rest of the world

Another favorite is VR Defender Y3K where you are defending your computer server from attacks. Tron-like graphics make it very fun but it doesn’t have much more then that and only has a few different map options for levels of difficulty.

The first one of these type of games I found was on Wrigley’s Candystand called Flash Circle TD which also doesn’t offer any variations leaving to stale after a while but is still very fun.

Noxins Defender is a sort of tower defense game with an Ultima Online theme, personally this really bored me and wasn’t any fun for me…you’re mileage may very.

Onslaught is one that seems easy at first but because it’s very slow to start there isn’t much challenge until you’re close to level 100. You can build a quick setup, walk away for awhile and you’ll still be alive when you get back. Building up the combos is fun and is where the real challenge it.

I haven’t had a chance to try this one yet, but WarCraft: Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS looks promising. From what I’ve read the base idea for all these tower games came from WarCraft III, but I’ve had no desire to play that or any other Blizzard game since StarCraft succeeded in boring the socks off of me. Looking at the compatibility list it does support the GBA Movie Player that I have, but the “DLDI patching” makes me a little nervous…something I should look into though as the NDS homebrew scene looks pretty good in general.

If anyone else knows of a good Tower Defense game (I mean good, there’s a lot of crappy ones out there too) please post it!

-EDIT 6/8-
Here’s another that just came around, Xeno Tactic. It’s pretty much a clone of DesktopTD with an alien theme and a lot more colors. When there’s a lot going on it gets really slow on older machines (most likely from the heavy use of animations on every creep). To get the more difficult maps you need to progress through the series of levels and the final is the 100 wave challenge map. DesktopTD is still my favorite due to the unique score keeping options.

-Edit 6/10-
I meant to add this one originally but wasn’t sure if it really fit. AntBuster is a defend your picnic cake from the ants with your turrets…turrets at a picnic? Fun doesn’t have to make sense! Every turret built increases in cost so you get limited to how many you can build quickly. Good placement and smart upgrades is how to play this one since they all start off as regular bullet turrets, how you upgrade them changes them. Lots of fun, this is a good one!