OVERVIEW: Defend Your Castle
By Shaun Hatton - May 13th, 2008
Yesterday Nintendo released a bunch of downloadable games over their WiiWare service. If you have a Wii, you can check it out by opening up your Wii Shop Channel and then navigating to “WiiWare.”
Last night I checked out the various titles available in the catalogue and because of the Wii’s rather limited storage space the only one I had room to download was Defend Your Castle. And I downloaded it accidentally, at that. The title costs 500 Wii Points, which translates to five dollars in the real world.
Once it was downloaded, I gave it a shot. Defend Your Castle is as straightforward a title as you can get for this game. You have a castle and you have to defend it against an onslaught of attackers. Visually, the game is simplistic. The background and castle itself look like cardboard cut-outs against a cork board background. Clouds drift by along the top of the screen and they, too, look like cutouts. Blue yarn is affixed to the top of them, and presumable there is a hidden person behind the scenes acting as puppeteer to them.
Your attackers have buttons for heads and are stick figures drawn in what appears to be crayon. To deflect them, you simply click on them, flick your pointer (which looks like a plastic bag tie like you get to close bread bags) into the air or smash them on the ground. They cry out in anguish as they’re destroyed.
In later stages, you get to use other kinds of weaponry. Some of your attackers will be rolling cap gun ammo and clicking on them will trigger an explosion which destroys nearby enemies. The sound effect for this is someone going “kerbooosh!” with his mouth. Amazing!
While I was initially irritated with myself for accidentally choosing to download this game, I ended up liking it quite a bit and I played it for about an hour. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re into quick, fast-paced, and hilarious games. Plus, it’s pretty cheap.
If you don’t have a Wii and are for some reason still reading this, you can still play Defend Your Castle in your browser. It just doesn’t look as nice. Check it out. Just don’t blame me if you don’t get all your work done today.
Subscribe to this page's RSS feed to be notified when someone chimes in.
One response so far:Subscribe to the Toronto Thumbs RSS feed to be notified when new articles are published.
I feel the WiiWare version is far superior to the web-based flash version. I have a lot of UI problems with the flash version that just go away with the natural click and flick of the Wii’s remote.
Plus the visual makeover to the Wii version is quite pretty compared to the minimalistic web-based version.