Defending Your Castle on Pennies a Day

Ah, Defend Your Castle; you've given me way more quality for five dollars than a lot of others do for sixty. Even though sitting down and trying to play through the game is impossible, it's equally daunting to not want to play a wave or two before starting up something else. Which is probably the way this game was meant to be played. I know it's been done to death on the PC; but I prefer the aesthetics in this one.

When was the last time you found a game to be worth the money you spent on it? With videogame pricing generally at $60 a pop in this generation, I find it takes a lot to justify shilling out that kind of money unless I'm going to be completely fulfilled and able to gorge myself on it later. In the world I live in, I have to provide things to my family like food, shelter, diapers and the almighty petrol. The best description of the way my wife looks at me when I ask if I can plunk down two tanks of gas for fun in disc form would be painful disdain. So, does that mean that if a game costs far less than that; should it be held in just as high a regard? If it were a greatest hits title that sells at the still absurd thirty bones mark; than yes, probably. But what if said game started out at a price point equivalent to your kids' Happy Meal? Such is the pickle I found myself in with XGen Studios WiiWare title, Defend Your Castle.

I'm fully aware that this game is available for free in Flash form on about a million websites; but I paid five dollars solely on atmosphere. Defend Your Castle takes the aesthetic approach of looking like a kindergartner's art project. Your castle is made of cut-out cardboard, your attackers are button-faced stick men and bottle cap-headed brutes who lay siege with Popsicle sticks and snap gun rounds in a very bare-boned world with cotton swab clouds. Ridiculously charming? Check that. And all the game play you really need to know is pressing A or B while aiming your bread tie cursor to pick enemies up, and all you have to do is toss them high enough to make them plummet to their deaths. Their screams of fear never get old.

You can deck out your fortress by spending points that you earned, starting with a way to convert enemies to your cause in towers that hold archers, ballistic experts, magicians and stone masons. In this your strategies lie in stealing enough stick men to fuel you defense campaign. It's entertaining...for the first thirty levels or so. It's then that I realized that the meat on them bones are suspiciously loose. Cooperative play can stem this problem for a while, but even this ends up getting boring after a while. I don't even think the devoted fans can keep going on this game, it runs strictly on fumes after a bit.

But I'm OK with that; it's fun while it lasts. And I answered that price versus content debate for myself. I could have poisoned my cardiac system with a greasy hamburger and an obscene amount of salt for the price I payed for Defend Your Castle. And while said combo meal will eventually run through me like no body's business; at least I can come back to DYC when I have an unnatural urge to punish stick people...