If you’re at all into collectable card games of any form, you likely already know who Brian Kibler. If not, he’s a professional Magic the Gathering player who has won over a quarter of a million dollars in competitive play over the years. Recently, he’s taken to developing his own games, most notably the digital collectable card game SolForge (Free). He’s been big into Hearthstone (Free) as well, and writes tons of interesting stuff about these kind of things on his blog.
Most recently, he discussed how free to play, play to win, and the various challenges that go into collectible games. If you’ve been following along with the free to play trends for a while, a lot of it might be obvious to you, but I thought his discussion on what does and doesn’t constitute “pay to win," which is an accusation thrown around quite often in the free to play world, was pretty great.
Let’s take a step back for a second and look at other types of competitions, like Starcraft or golf. Would anyone describe these games as “Pay-to-Win?” Probably not. And yet could you imagine a professional Starcraft player trying to win an open qualifier using a computer that barely meets the minimum system requirements for the game? What about a golfer playing in a major with second-hand clubs purchased from a thrift shop?
Brian then goes on to discuss card rotation in digital card games, which is something that I find to be fascinating as all of these new digital card games will inevitably go through the same growing pains as Magic did which resulted in the variety of formats players can play (essentially meaning, which cards you’re allowed to use).
All around super interesting stuff, particularly if you’ve been following along with the development of Hearthstone and similar games as they’re maturing into their own solid free to play ecosystems. I don’t want to steal too much of Brian Kibler’s thunder by excessively quoting everything here, but seriously, give his article a read.
This was my favorite back in the day... Awesome!
Great title, and I've been replaying it on 6 Plus. Looks and works great. (Minor visual glitch: the creep death shockwave on the background grid is positioned wrong. Very minor!)
Me too. It's super-slick on the 6 Plus and looks like the old glowing vector displays with very little noticeable aliasing and pixels to ruin the effect. The game can be _so_ difficult and yet it has that just-one-more-time draw. My only complaint has always been about the sticky placement. It should slide around obstacles rather than stick in place when it is too close to something else, IMO.
I don't get why it's asking me to buy the game again. I adored it in high school.
Maybe you were using a different Apple ID back then? Or maybe you were playing the demo. Does it show up in your iTunes library?
Different email address, perhaps. Same iTunes account, though. Nah, full version. And nope, instead of the "redownload" icon it says "$1.99".
"This update is free because you own a previous version of this item." Yay!
Bout time! I actually recently downloaded this, and then was pretty bummed that it didn't work on iOS8.
Wow. I used to love this game. I haven't played it since 2010. So long ago I had to log into an old account to redownload it. Kudos on the Dev fro bringing it back to life after 5 years.
It's just as hard as I remember. Even beating the first tutorial level without losing a life requires some effort; at least for me :-(
My only complaint is that David is so stingy with levels. Each one has to be a masterpiece.
I wish he would take the quantity over quality approach of angry birds, candy crush or two dots and give us dozens. I would gladly pay $1 each.
Or let people design their own for upload.
One of the few games to still be on my device after all this time, excellent TD and great update.
Loved this game. Still have it in my old phones/pads. Glad to see it updated. Now, send more levels, please!
Amazing! This is a back to the future nostalgic game which I loved. This is one of the best TD ever made. I'm so glad they updated it, finally! Welcome back! Great news Jared. Ps: this is one of that old school iphone games, when most of them were exciting, not like nowadays.
Plz make it Universal allready. Enough Time has past ;-)
Is kind of odd that they added support for the new larger phone screens. Seems like it wouldn't have taken much more work to add native iPad support as well. Oh well, still a classic
One of our favorite games. It's great to get an update finally after waiting so many years for this to happen :)
Did geodefense swarm get an update as well?
No
It's next on the list says the article.
Now I'm mostly happy with my iPhone 6. Only one app update remains on my radar: 7 Cities TD. Would love to see that updated for iPhone 6 screen...
I missed vectorTD on iOS and now it's gone ;c played it as a ps3 mini and loved it.
A universal update is what this game needs to truly resurrect it from the afterlife.
Please make it ipad ready as far as screen resolution. I have this on my android phone but not my iPad as there is no native resolution version. Loved this game otherwise!
My fav TD game out there. Been waiting for this for a long time now. The new service menu is kinda strange. I like the fact that the only way to beat level before was on your own. Still great great game though.