Archmaille

Overwhelming the map

So I’ve fallen in love with this stupid little flash game called “Desktop Tower Defense”  It’s really a very simplistic game.  You have lines of “monsters” that cross your desktop, and you build towers to defend it.  And not desktop like computer desktop, it’s actually designed to be a desk top complete with change, keyboard, and a few bucks.  I really wish some of those things worked in your favor though and were used as blockades.  It’s still amazingly fun as is.  I’ve played a lot of different types of tower defense games, some based on Warcraft 3, Others you’ve got a pre-made maze… This one is by far my favorite though.

Desktop Tower Defense Map Overview

This picture shows the same thing as above, just after the game it lets you see how you’ve done.  This is one of my favorite features of the game, it lets you analyze how you built your map, and redo it better.  This map is designed to keep the monsters in for as long as possible.  Not always the best of ideas though, as you can see I didn’t even make it through the whole game, the next example I have is much more simple, but got me to the end of the game with 14 lives to spare.

Better Design Desktop TD

This design centers more around having a small concentrated area of fire, and making the monsters walk around it always close to the most powerful towers.  Even if they do make it further down the maze, they’re always close to more powerful towers, even if they’re not in the maze as long it kills them faster this way.  And less money is wasted on initial construction.  It is always better to upgrade towers, than to continue building new towers because they increase in power exponentially.  Anyways, go play yourself some Desktop Tower Defense and tell me what you think!  Credal and I had a whole huge battle going on for best score.  Add you score to the group “Archmaille” to see how you compare!

written by Archmaille

Now that is the question… And a good question indeed.  I have answered it not to ReadyBoost any longer.  The REAL thing that I wanted to see major improvement for was boot times… and in all honesty I didn’t really notice much difference.  I hear a lot of people saying ReadyBoost made their computer start up 40% faster and some claim even more than that.  I never saw it myself, maybe they’ve got 1gig or less of RAM I don’t know, but it didn’t seem that amazing to me.  Plus, sometime here in the somewhat near future I do plan on making the move to a 4 HDD RAID 5EE array which should take care of any sluggish load times.

Another thing that I HATED about ReadyBoost was that when it cached items… I don’t know what it was caching, but it must of been big, about three times a day (at least every day as I noticed) it would start to cache (I could tell because the HDD light would come on, and the light for the flash drive would freak out) my computer would come to a halt, using 75% of my CPU and sucking down every bit of resiliance my Hard Drive had it would try to make things easier for Windows to find IN CASE it might need to be loaded… And then inevitably it would do it in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep, although a relatively silent process the wildly random blinking lights were always annoying when trying to fall asleep.  Because I have so much open all the time (Firefox, Games, Thunderbird, etc.) any time I closed anything it seemed to want to cache that item right away.

I will give ReadyBoost credit though.  It did seem to make game map loads much quicker for certain games.  Ones such as Half-Life:2 and a few others that would pre-cache maps it made the loading screens few and far between, which I was very happy about.

written by Archmaille