At first I was sort of undecided regarding my intentions to make a Classic Video Game Monday post today. See, as a general rule I don’t post on the weekends (at least not very often), and for a lot of us American-types, today is still technically “the weekend”, being Memorial Day and all. However, I didn’t want to let a Monday go by without a CVGM post, and so here I present a rather light-hearted one: an entire genre of the wonderful thing known as TOWER DEFENSE.

I was first introduced to this genre with Use-Map-Settings games in StarCraft, a game that I played religiously for several years.

“UMS” games were games where instead of playing a straightforward StarCraft match, you would play different sorts of games that had been specifically set up for you. There were a couple different styles that were perennially popular, such as “Golem Madness”, which involved combining units into hero units, and there were also various tower defense games. “Team Matrix D” was the biggie back then, if I recall correctly, and I was pretty immediately addicted to it. It involved waves of enemies coming for you– each wave getting stronger– and you had to build various defenses and patrolling units to keep them at bay. It was amazingly fun and unbelievably addictive.

So zip forward a couple of years and you’ve got Tower Defense games cropping up, Flash-style, across the Internet, so you can build and destroy to your heart’s content. Desktop Tower Defense has always been my favorite:

The depth here for strategy is endless. Endless, just like the kicking I do to myself if I let so much as a single mob pass through. Yeah I’m a perfectionist.

Desktop Tower Defense isn’t the only one that’s out there, though. And when I come across a Tower Defense game somewhere, I am always immediately gripped by an uncontrollable urge to drop everything and master said game.

The saddest part about Tower Defense is that you’re really not sure who to give thanks to for inventing the genre. I suppose you could say it had its roots in “Rampart“, but even that isn’t telling the full story. Wikipedia says “Early tower defense games appeared post-2000 in maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III.” You know what that means? That means that this awesome genre was pretty much invented by the community. By your everyday RTS player who wanted to have some fun. Whoever you are out there, you are a genius and you rock. Same with whoever invented DotA, but that’s another story.

…but Obligatory DotA Song Insert is Obligatory.

…I now know what next week’s CVGM will be. Eeeeexcellent. *arches fingers*

Happy Memorial Day everyone!