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For anyone that doesn't know what he's talking about: Desktop Tower Defense

Warning: Prepare to spend a lot of hours there if you've never played before

I like Desktop Tower Defense.

Almost everyone running Plura's crap is unaware of it. It's embedded in web pages like advertising. For example, you know the highly popular Desktop Tower Defense?

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp

Look at the page sources. There's a Plura bug on it running the whole time you're playing the game. They've already been doing this for a long time.

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/

According to an interview, the Desktop Tower Defense guy is making $8000 a month from ads alone.

The real question is: can you make a game that is as good, as addictive and as simple as this?

Don't tell me about that fantastic game that you used to play on the C64 and have never been able to recreate the excitement on a PC. It's because you were a kid discovering video-games, not the Commode64.

Well, I'm going to tell you about it, because you're wrong. Lode Runner on C-64 is one of the greatest games I've ever played.

You're right that the C-64 has been totally, radically surpassed in every capacity by modern machines, but how fun a video is game isn't directly proportional to the quality of the computer language it's written in or the speed of the hardware it's run on. Today's Flash games are a good proof of that. The best games I've played lately are Desktop Tower Defense and Fantastic Contraption, even though the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 probably surpass a flash-window in a web browser much the way they surpass the C-64.

And it's not just findness for "the good old days" and my excitement as a kid discovering the game. I know that for sure because I downloaded a C-64 emulator and the exact same Lode Runner game I'd remembered as being great from when I was 10 years old, and it was still an absolutely fabulous game when I was 30 years old. It simply has very clever mechanics and level design that really make you think to get through the levels.

The difference of course is that the image file itself is benign -- the decoders were flawed. Whereas the Flash decoder is adware BY DESIGN.

The creators of Flash, Adobe/Macromedia, deliberately resist allowing user control of Flash. Why must I go to a 3rd party to selectively block Flash? Why can't I control Flash in my browser to a very simple extent such as "Flash cannot play sound without asking permission." Why does Adobe make Flash an "all or nothing" experience? The answer was given to me straight up by Flash evangelist: "If you could control your experience, it would not be a good advertising platform." As floored as I was by that statement, I realized that is Flash's great selling point for many people -- here is an ad that is unavoidable and will generate a lot of attention.

I block flash with noscript, and I refuse to buy from a site that requires Flash. I certainly enjoy Flash games at home, but at work I've blocked flash at the firewall level for YEARS now. And I've never had one legitimate complaint of "I need flash to do this" that was work related.

http://www.handdrawngames.com/ should fix that.

It's irritating to have links on words if the href has nothing to do with the anchor text .

This is a simple game that once you start you just wont be able to stop! Just build a few towers to that shoot to stop monsters from reaching their destination..... Yea right. Get yourself a group scoreboard and try to perfect your maize. You will kill a lot of time with this game. I have created a damage vs cost table for all the towers at their different levels - just for those of you that obsess. http://www.gozlit.com/blog/index.php/Nigel/2007/11/cost-vs-damage-matrix-for-desktop-tower- The game is at http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/ The table I have created is for version 1.5; which was the latest when i wrote this. Enjoy

Kingdom of Loathing
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/

or
Desktop Tower Defence
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp/

I'm really not sure if KoL uses Flash, but it's worth checking out if you can.

-hps