Octopus Overlords

I really disliked You Monster. It felt gimmicky and I ended up annoyed more than challenged.

hepcat wrote:I really disliked You Monster. It felt gimmicky and I ended up annoyed more than challenged.

A few missions felt that way to me, but I did come around to like the campaign as a whole after further play.

I finally found time dedicate to playing this more than just attempting to complete missions. Actually have time (hooray to retiring and having about 2 months of free time) to study how the towers interact and replay maps multiple times with different strategies.

Yes, still going through Awakenings (finished the Story mode with all golds), but working on knocking out as many OO high scores as I can. Got most of the first 6 mission high scores (sub-missions included), so far. I might stop working on the high score thing, once I get near 100 Gold Missions just to get that finished.

It is interesting the numerous ways missions can be completed and still generate similar high scores. I understand why everyone loved this game so much when it was first released. Now I get to enjoy trying to catch up - while trying to knock down those long term OO high scores.

theohall wrote:I finally found time dedicate to playing this more than just attempting to complete missions. Actually have time (hooray to retiring and having about 2 months of free time) to study how the towers interact and replay maps multiple times with different strategies.

Yes, still going through Awakenings (finished the Story mode with all golds), but working on knocking out as many OO high scores as I can. Got most of the first 6 mission high scores (sub-missions included), so far. I might stop working on the high score thing, once I get near 100 Gold Missions just to get that finished.

It is interesting the numerous ways missions can be completed and still generate similar high scores. I understand why everyone loved this game so much when it was first released. Now I get to enjoy trying to catch up - while trying to knock down those long term OO high scores.

Nice job on getting the high score on some of those maps! I should try the Awakening campaign again.

-Lyno!

Achieved Fully Contained and Core Container yesterday. Down to five locked achievements for DG. Not sure I'll ever get to zero at the rate they keep adding them...

Zaxxon wrote:Achieved Fully Contained and Core Container yesterday. Down to five locked achievements for DG. Not sure I'll ever get to zero at the rate they keep adding them...

All achievements... achieved!

Where's my DG2???

Finished You Monster yesterday and started going back to get Golds in the various campaign Story Mode missions. I got stuck on the first really nasty trickses by GlaDoS and didn't come back for awhile after finishing Containment.

What a great game. Theo- who are you on Steam (Pyperkub here). lyno has some pretty high scores, as does a friend of mine. I'll probably be looking at finishing up some achievements (cleaning up those Silvers, etc... though I got a bit OCD on one of the early ones last night, where I kept ending up about a handful away from Gold on multiple play throughs but finally got it around 1:30 am, and was so wired I did some work before getting to bed around 3:30...

I got my high scores through frequent use of the Backspace key (back to last checkpoint key) and minimizing the number of turrets and upgrades in order to maximize interest. Most of the global high scores are achieved through "juggling" ie creating a maze and then adding and removing key turrets to bounce the creeps back and forth through your maze. Some people think juggling is cheating. I only compare my scores to my Steam friends so juggling is a non-issue with me.

-Lyno!

Yup, what Lyno said.

Yeah, I only compare and shoot for the steam buddies too.

Over the weekend, I fired up my first Grinder on the airplane. I gave up 3 cores around wave 42 and was hovering my finger over the backspace key, but ultimately decided against it. They were my only 3 cores lost... argghhh!

Getting ready to go back to it soon.

Pyperkub wrote:Yeah, I only compare and shoot for the steam buddies too.

Over the weekend, I fired up my first Grinder on the airplane. I gave up 3 cores around wave 42 and was hovering my finger over the backspace key, but ultimately decided against it. They were my only 3 cores lost... argghhh!

Getting ready to go back to it soon.

You can only get a high score if you have all 10 cores. So losing a core is an automatic back-to-last-checkpoint for me.

-Lyno!

Lyno wrote:

Pyperkub wrote:Yeah, I only compare and shoot for the steam buddies too.

Over the weekend, I fired up my first Grinder on the airplane. I gave up 3 cores around wave 42 and was hovering my finger over the backspace key, but ultimately decided against it. They were my only 3 cores lost... argghhh!

Getting ready to go back to it soon.

You can only get a high score if you have all 10 cores. So losing a core is an automatic back-to-last-checkpoint for me.

-Lyno!

Wasn't sure if Grinder worked that way too (it was my first shot). Did get a silver on it curiously enough.

Pyperkub wrote:

Lyno wrote:

Pyperkub wrote:Yeah, I only compare and shoot for the steam buddies too.

Over the weekend, I fired up my first Grinder on the airplane. I gave up 3 cores around wave 42 and was hovering my finger over the backspace key, but ultimately decided against it. They were my only 3 cores lost... argghhh!

Getting ready to go back to it soon.

You can only get a high score if you have all 10 cores. So losing a core is an automatic back-to-last-checkpoint for me.

-Lyno!

Wasn't sure if Grinder worked that way too (it was my first shot). Did get a silver on it curiously enough.

You can get a Silver with less than 10 cores, but Gold is only possible with all 10 cores.

-Lyno!

Greetings commander! Awaken once again!

Now Kickstarted as a board game

Man, I'd love to support them but $80 is too rich for my blood.

I recently played the Awakening and You Monster campaigns. I played only with the goal of reaching the end of the campaigns, rather than earning achievements, and had a lot of fun doing so.

I really like the presentation, such as the changes in the appearance and sound of the towers after you upgrade them. The voice acting adds a lot of personality. The music, though repetitive, is good.

The distinct strategy features make you think a little harder. Like the way upgrading a tower briefly takes it out of commission. How enemies have to steal your power cores, but can pass them to other enemies if you kill them. And how you want to hold onto money for as long as possible to build interest.

The AI companion has some intriguing flashbacks, but I wish the story ultimately revealed who he really was and what had happened. Maybe it did and I missed it, or maybe this is explored in Defense Grid 2.

A bit of the gloss wore off when I looked up YouTube videos for how to beat the harder levels and learned that the preferred strategy was cannon spamming. I then tried this strategy, and it worked, but I would have preferred to win those levels with a more varied mix of towers. Even though they might not be as effective, I love using fully upgraded concussion, meteor, laser, and inferno towers. They have pizzazz!

It was great dealing with the Portal AI's passive-aggressive attitude and trickery in the You Monster campaign. Her script could have used more variety, though. Some of her snide remarks were repeated mission after mission. It would have been nice to have another song from her, as well as Portal-inspired background music for the levels.

I played a few missions of the Borderlands and Resurgence campaigns. They're fun, but I prefer having some story, so I'll probably just move on to DG2.

Hey thanks for sharing. Always like reading about peoples' gaming experiences, even (especially?) older games.

You're welcome, and thank you for the encouragement. I feel less weird now for posting about the oldies.

The Defense Grid games /expansions are just great games and I bounce back into them periodically.

DG2 answers a lot of the narrative questions, FWIW.

I just found out that the Containment DLC has story in it and picks up where the Awakening left off. That's where I'm headed next!

I've finished the Containment DLC. It was a fun 8-mission romp with new characters and enhanced background visuals. I'm proud that I earned gold medals on half the missions and the achievements Clear Skies, Clean Getaway, Foresight is 20/20, and This is … spartan.

I should admit to getting some help from YouTube videos. But I noted with interest that these videos had a lot of diversity in the recommended strategies. It wasn't just cannon spamming this time.

From these DLCs, I wonder what other cool tie-ins they could have done. Maybe System Shock and Bioshock. They could also have various comedians portray funny AIs.

The celebrity voices for Containment were a little off, but in a strangely endearing way. I look forward to further tales of Fletcher, Cai, and Simon in Defense Grid 2. But I need a break from DG. I'm having visions of it while trying to focus on other things.

Fired this up on the xBox via backwards compatibility (360). Not sure if it was a Games with Gold or Game Pass pickup, but I still love this game!

I'm thinking that one of the things which really sets it apart from other Tower Defense games is the (raspberries!) Narrator - having live commentary is something some games could do more of, provided it is done well.

If anyone else is interested in firing it up on the xBox, feel free to add me as a friend for high score comps! Pr0ner and Kato look like the only ones of my friends who have scores in Awakening, and it doesn't appear as if they did all the Story missions...

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 2:38 pm Fired this up on the xBox via backwards compatibility (360). Not sure if it was a Games with Gold or Game Pass pickup, but I still love this game!

I'm thinking that one of the things which really sets it apart from other Tower Defense games is the (raspberries!) Narrator - having live commentary is something some games could do more of, provided it is done well.

Yeah, and that was one of the issues I had with DG2--despite having Mr. 'Leaf on the Wind' among its cast, the voice acting just drove me nuts. DG1 4-eva!

I have over 600 hours in it. Got back to it last year after finishing DG-2. That one was pretty good altho not as goo as 1. I specialized in those 99 wave games where you can get millions of points.

I absolutely loved the first DG, so of course bought the second on release I think, but never got past the first several maps for some reason. Got a wild hair and decided to right that wrong, and I'm getting the same "meh" vibe as I did when I tried to play it so many years ago. It's just not nearly as engaging as the first for some reason, and I'm not sure why. I think part of it is I am playing on Normal, Campaign, and there is absolutely no challenge, thus no fun, whatsoever. If I can make it into the first 5 maps of a campaign on a TD game without even trying, it's too easy IMO. I will try bumping to hard to see if it helps, but I definitely prefer 1 over 2, and from reading the comments on Steam, I am not alone in that.

I finished 2 okay. Rather short. But I definitely liked 1 a lot better.

Agreed. I've got > 200 hours into DG1. Something like 25 into DG2. So not bad by any means, but it's missing the spark from the first.

Wow, ok, just switched campaign to hard. The ramp from Normal to Hard is... significant. Certainly doable, with multiple restarts I guess. Probably a lot closer to DG1 "Normal" IIRC.

I see they also added the option for a "Classic" scoring and upgrade mode (I assume due to player feedback/complaints) that was not there when I first played. Maybe turning that option on as well as playing on Hard, this will feel a little better, and more like the damn near perfect DG1.