This is my wife's fault.
How? Why? Why are we here? Why does it matter? That, my friend, is a bit of a story.
Where we are: The tail end of the tail end of Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath.
I have two Steam Achievements left to go on this game. These two are the grindiest, most boring achievements out of this bunch, but I am going to grind them out. (Don't worry, not dragging you through that part. You only get the fun parts. Like, this is where a written report shines in comparison to Livestream. I can edit out the worst 90% and just give you the gems. Er, pun intended: (Gemcraft). I like puns. Also like gems. Sue me.) I am going to grind this out the rest of the way to an official finish line, and this is my wife's fault.
Eh, two achievements. Can't be that bad, right? Well, true enough. Even grindy things can be ground out. How many other achievements have I already completed for this game? 25? 50?
Wait, what? That's not a sane number. Like add in thirty more and the total would be 666. The devs must have noticed that. Probably not trying for that total, but who knows. Maybe they racked their brains for weeks and just fell short, halting at 636. Or maybe one of them got spooked and thought better of teasing the devil with a Biblical number. Devs can sometimes be a superstitious lot. I know, because, I have spent two decades as a game developer.
So there are the worst two left amongst the grinding achievements. Yay, pain. You have to have been there at some point in your life, right? You can relate. You know what this feels like: the Sunk Cost Fallacy driving you forward into something you might rather avoid, but you want to check the Completion Box(TM) so that you can collect your salary and Advance Directly to GO. We all like that feeling of triumph when reaching GO. Of course you do. And it feels a little sweeter when you come out the other side if there was pain involved. Submit to the hazing, go through some torture, and earn the little badge to pin to your collar. Nobody really gives a *bleep* about it, but you do, because, yeah. That's life. You lose, lose, lose, lose, or else toil in obscurity, and then you win something and feel like you climbed Mount Everest. Not everybody does that, but you did, so take a victory lap and enjoy the win.
At least, that's what I hoped to feel like. If I could just grind out these really grindy goals. Why am I even in this game, again? That's right. It's my wife's fault. ... We'll get to that. (Can you tell that I had HOURS to think about this game report. Yay, hours of grinding. Lots of time in which to toy around with words, ideas... craft some jokes. Make shoveling horse poop out of the barn sound like a romantic adventure. You're still reading. I must be doing OK at it. (The report writing, not the grinding part.) Oh my god, wait until you see the number I have to reach. This may be the worst recommendation for a game, ever. 'Come grind away!' Yeah.)
All right, let's back up a step. What even is this game? It's a grognard Tower Defense game for Math Geeks and Mensa Members. Sort of. Well, the math part is real, but the game has no true fail state, only a "get as far as you can" design, with a win state ranging from quick and easy to 'OK, didn't see that coming.' Unlock stuff, level up, power up, go again, now with more strength, so you can fight harder foes. I'll show you a clip of the game board. Later.
This game is several years old, and I played it to a mastery level when it first came out. I played its predecessor, too. Also played it all the way out. Like, it's fun. In a Tower Defense roguelike kind of way. Construct your maze. Place towers. Start game. Mindless enemies come, like the largest schools of fish in the history of the world, swimming into your barrel, and you shoot them. You shoot a lot of them. You shoot hundreds, thousands of them. (OK, this is not sounding as good, on paper, as it plays in the game. Hmm. ...) Perhaps there is something wrong with my psychology. Shoot thousands upon thousands of fish in a barrel, then raise my arms in triumph like I achieved something. Meh. Might as well own it. It's fun.
At least, the game is fun. Some of the achievements are fun. 634 of the 636 achievements were fun enough not even to notice how bad the last 2 would be. Now here I am. But when I am miserable (not 'run over by a truck' level of miserable, just mildly miserable) my wife is entertained. She is especially entertained if there is irony involved, and double that again if she had a hand it. Which she most definitely did, this time. Wife very much entertained.
So I played out the most fun part, unlocked everything (That alone is an achievement, since the game has a lot of stuff to unlock and it's scattered around like the Big Bang scattered all the galaxies.) At the point at which I could set up an advanced Mana Farm with 75% of the board, and slow enemies so they crawled through the mana-gathering part of the maze, and kill literally hundreds of waves of enemies with mana gain gems alone, there's nothing more to do except get more and more efficient at doing this. Use the gathered mana to fund ridiculously powerful killing gems, set up in the last quarter of the maze, and click High Speed and watch the game play itself. Mostly. This sets up a doom loop where the numbers get truly crazy but you're just repeating the same plan in every game. And that was where I stopped, years ago, with 132 Steam Achievements left undone in this game.
But here I am, back again, with a goal of finishing it out. You've probably had that experience with a game. You play it out, master it, maybe pop most of the achievements (if you liked the game enough to care), but hit a satiated point and walk away. "Maybe I'll come back and finish the rest, someday," but you move on and forget about it. Or maybe you do come back.
I had to play a fresh profile for a handful of games, to refresh my memory. Stepping away from a game for literally years, details submerge. Rust forms. My rust was an inch thick, but a little elbow grease, and yeah, it's like riding a bicycle. You never truly forget. Knock down 12 achievements here, 7 there, a few more in dribbles and drabs. Next thing you know, you're down to 30, but there's some 'hidden' secrets. I'm old enough to remember the Old Days(TM) Before The Internet, when you were on your own for figuring out easter eggs and secrets. Not any more! Steve from Milwaukee, or Andrew from Austin, or Ichiro from Tokyo has already figured it out, and I'm not that keen on earning my way through this at Maximum Pain level, so yeah. I looked up a few things. Hey, I'm old enough to get away with that. "Old Grandpa over there, he's old enough to have seen dinosaurs with his own eyes." Then the number was down to 13, then 7. Three of my last 7 are the rarest three in terms of players unlocking them, so I can verify: Yep, those are among the hardest to hit by accident.
When I got to 30, I began to stare at the grinding ones. I could see my enemy gearing up out there across the battlefield. Like, who couldn't see an army of THAT size coming? One of the achievements was to kill a million monsters. Not joking. A MILLION. 1,000,000. That's six zeroes and two commas. If you start needing the commas, we've left the realm of counting on your fingers. Although you can do that for each wave. There's only three monster types in this game: regulars, swarmers, and giants. Might be as few as 3 or 4 giants in a wave. Maybe a couple or few dozen swarmers, ten or twelve regulars. There's ways to summon extra, but not enough to double a wave, practically speaking. At the highest end of campaign mode, you might get 3500 enemies per game. So yeah, a million? A million. I was barely past half a million when I had 132 achievements left to go, and barely past 600,000 when I was down to 13 left. There was going to be pure grinding ahead in my future. Yay.
That wasn't the scary part, though. A million is grindable. The numbers may go up slowly, but they do add, and not ever subtract. The game is still reasonably fun, and there were lots of boards left where I had not played out a serious game of survival mode. Just play some more games and don't watch the pot while it boils. Next thing you know? "Now arriving in Million Town. Please exit the train on the right." You can see a light at the end of the tunnel. The other nasty grinding achievement? Collect a full set of puzzle piece shapes. There are 64 shapes, so each shape that drops for you has a 1 in 64 chance to be a specific shape type. Well, I had 61 out of 64 shapes collected, but also the warning from multiple other players on the net who finished this achievement last out of all 636 Steam Achievements. When you are down to needing just 1 shape left, you may not even be HALFWAY done. Like, there is nothing to increase the odds of that particular piece dropping, so you might go through as many games as you already have and still not get that one to drop. And there is no 'progress'. You will get it eventually, if you never stop, but it's a matter of luck, and the math is not kind.
So I formed my strategy. First, knock out the other 28, all of them. During that span, I would be racking up kills toward the million, and racking up puzzle piece tries. And I did collect 2 out of the last 3 that I needed, during that part. So, 360,000 more kills to go and 1 piece to collect. Well, instead of just playing and having fun, I could instead try to farm puzzle pieces in the most time-efficient way possible. If I go the fun route, I will be leaning into killing more monsters and getting fewer puzzle pieces. I might be here for years with that approach, or even wash out with 1 left undone. Or I could lean the other way. Pick a board with a high number of monsters (over 3k), and a game design that would drop 2 or 3 puzzle pieces per game, and just grind. Rapidly. Five to seven minutes per game, mostly on the setup. Hit fast forward, call waves early in groups of four or five at a time, annihilate all the poor fish (because I'm WAY overleveled for that setup), frown at getting the wrong pieces while inching toward a million kills. Rinse and repeat.
And so I said, out loud, "If God loves me, I'll get this piece to drop before I finish the million."
Don't toy around with jokes like that. Really. They can come back and bite you in the face.
Hours went by. Grindy games chugged through, one after another. Mind you, I'm not just sitting there like a statue. I was actually making some productive use of this time. I listened to some podcasts. Listened to music. Nodded and smiled at the wife's chatter when she was going on about something in the many books she's reading and reviewing this summer. (You can check out her opinions on those books over in the book review section.)
I might have listened to audio books while grinding, but I don't do audio books. I like to be able to pause during reading, reflect on something moving or significant, and audio books don't let you do that. They turn books into a Movie Light, or an Audio Movie. You get tone of voice from the narrator, maybe even character voices, but you also get dragged along. I guess it's got its up sides, and intelligent people can find a pause button somewhere, but I would rather just read the book. You're a reader, too. You're not only reading this, but still bearing with me, so you at least grok what I'm saying. Anyway, no audio books. I prefer to respect a book by giving it my undivided attention. If the book isn't worth that, in your opinion, why even read it? Great books are worth the dedication.
I might have gone outside to watch the grass grow, but I didn't want to walk up and down the stairs that many times. Half the time spent on each game was setting things up, and then the playthroughs were over too quickly for me actually to measure any growth of grass.
And yes, this is my wife's fault. Blaming her. She deserves it. You'll see. ...
OK, so. My wife. Who is she? How did we meet? What is our story? Bear with me. There's context, here, and I will pay off all the questions and promises. And jumping to the end won't help, because the story lies in the journey.
But first, who am I? Some of you already know. I ran a gaming blog for half a decade, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That's right. This isn't my first rodeo. I've been off the circuit for over two decades, during which I had a career as a game developer and started a family. We have four kids, and they keep us busy. All the gaming culture has migrated over to video, in that time. There's streaming, there's video channels, there's podcasts. There's seven generations of new technology, and encountering me is like opening a time capsule. And yet, I have been in contact with some of the fans of my old gaming blog, and some of them still remember me, still use terminology I invented (colorful metaphors galore) in some of my old reports. They still remember, still care, and some look forward to reading new reports. Well, that's pretty cool. And humbling. Like, who doesn't want to, and try to, have positive impact on other people? But not everyone checks this box: the impact of your writing still rippling along after more than twenty years absent. Here's hoping the new content proves worthy of this degree of loyalty and the long wait.
So, time to introduce you to my wife. Some of you may be arriving here after finding her first, but this may still enlighten you. Some of you already know me. Some may have found our fiction first (yet to be published as I write this, but you may be arriving on a later date). Some may be all new. Welcome to Cultural Countervailance, where we chug along away from the beaten path, in search of vibrancy to add to our lives outside the flows of mainstream culture. We do all things indie: indie books, indie games, indie commentary. We try to support fellow indie creators, too. If you've got a spark in you, we may be kindred spirits.
The year was 2006, December 1, when I met her. It's the closing days for World of Warcraft's vanilla run. The first expansion is coming out in January, 2007. A friend got me World of Warcraft for my birthday back in the summer because, yeah. No way I was doing that on my own. And that's the first and the second irony. Multiple forces outside myself conspired to put me in that place at that time.
Firstly, I had a falling out with Blizzard during Diablo 2 and even flipped them the F Bomb publicly. It was a big enough deal to draw attention from one of their VPs, to have a polite exchange with me in public over the net, since I had been one of their more widely-followed fan sites. My complaints were twofold: first, regarding the predatory nature of disallowing players to opt out of Player vs Player gameplay modes; second, regarding the predatory nature of leading players along with early access and volunteer testing only to use their feedback against them. They had no answer for my second, deeper complaint, so I never helped them again; but the first issue, the VP later revealed to me (in regard to World of Warcraft, which was still in development, then) that this new game would have servers where players could opt out of PvP combat. And he invited me to give it a try some day.
I had no plans to do that, but the universe finds a way. I got a gift copy of WoW out of the blue and gave it a try. And, without interruptions from duelists and griefers, I did have fun.
Secondly, a month into my WoW adventure, my father suffered a severe stroke. He had been living me with me for the prior seven years after suffering congestive heart failure. He was cooking himself some lunch one afternoon. I was between game dev assignments, so I had free time and I was spending it on WoW. I took a break to get a drink, gave my father a hug and told him I loved him, and like an hour later, I'm smelling rice burning on the stove. Not the first time, so I thought nothing of it, but I go downstairs to look for him, and--yeah. I spent half of the next two months in hospital then in nursing home, with the other half resting from those exertions. I rolled a new character in WoW, on the newest server, since I needed to be able to play alone and veg out, and not need to coordinate with anybody. And it was on that new character and new server that I met her.
I had launched a new casual guild. The Warcraft server was a 'roleplay' server, and I stayed in character. I recruited dozens of people, less than half of whom stuck, but some did stick. Turns out not many folks ever took the roleplay part seriously, but life was hard those months and I needed a deep escape. My father would pass away in mid-December, but it was clear long before then that he would never walk again, speak clearly, etc. If you've lived through something similar, you know how it is. If not, well. Life doesn't last forever. Sooner or later, grief will find your door, so don't waste any days.
I played only that one character and she leveled rapidly, for that era. I made good in-game money off crafting and selling at the auction house, so I was there reasonably often. I like a challenge, so I was playing my Druid with fancy, good-looking armor with less than half the protection on it that I could have had. This made me work harder at the game, in combat, but eh. I sure looked good doing it! Better than most others, which drew some attention. Some of the attention was negative; people thought I was stupid and didn't know which armors to wear for my class--which entertained me. This was a brand new server with nobody leveled up yet, and I was playing a Night Elf. That race only had like five classes available, back then, and most everyone wanting to play the Priest class was opting to play Human or Gnome, for the stat bonuses they offered. No other class available to Night Elves was limited to cloth armor, so almost none of the elf characters were wearing the best-looking outfits. I enjoyed standing out.
And then one day, on that December 1st, this happened:
The Auction House was as crowded as a busy anthill. (Not just any old anthill. A busy one!) If you have ever played Warcraft, I'm sure you can picture the scene. If not, imagine several dozen cartoony characters standing around together in a group, appearing to do nothing at all. Each player is interacting with the auctioneers and working the user interface, trying either to buy something from or sell something to other players. Occasionally, one takes off at random, or a new one arrives to join the otherwise inactive-looking jumble.
And there she was, also on her Druid character, also in cloth armor, which also matched the oddball color of her character's hair. We were like shining male birds amidst a whole flock of dull females. And I was still trying to recruit more people to my little casual guild, and she had no guild tag on her character. So of course I walked right up to her and struck up a bold and clever conversation. I delivered the most dashing and impressive lines, and--
Wait. Nope. That's how it was SUPPOSED to go, in my imagination. Meanwhile, in reality, I'm still trying to type, "Hello", and only got to Hell before she spun and darted away, down the ramp and up the path. Byebye! Nice to almost meet you.
So when they come to me years from now, young men looking for advice on how to find their own gamer girl to marry, rob the cradle and scoop one up who's fresh off the assembly line, I've got the best possible advice waiting to give them. "First, start out by mistaking her for a dude. (Because, yeah, mostly males playing video games back in the days of vanilla Warcraft.) Then try to strike up a conversation about armor and playing outside the normal gaming pathways, adding extra challenge to your playthroughs but getting the reward of your character looking cooler in the process. Maybe you and this dude can compare notes on where to get the best dresses for your female characters, and whether or not he plans to participate in the upcoming roleplay fashion show to be held in the center of the city. Next up, say the word, "Hell," out loud in the auction house, drawing stares and snickers, as you dart out to chase this 'guy' across the entire city (game cities aren't quite the size of real cities, but you don't have to mention that part) and case this guy everywhere he goes until you manage to corner him in some shop, where the mugging can take place. You are carrying the biggest, strongest staff available for your character level and make a show of swinging it just to show it off. Then you realize you're in the Tailor Shop and this guy is one-upping you by not only wearing cloth armor but making his own, forsaking all the profit of selling leather armor to the hordes and hordes (pun intended) of Druids and Rogues that everybody else has rolled. Then you manage to ask a question or two, and you stand there for five minutes not getting a single word in because you Unleashed the Chat Kraken(TM)."
OK, not a dude. This druid chatters like only girls can do. No guild tag, though! Recruit her anyway. "So, um, yeah. You haven't found a good guild, yet, I see. Would you like to give my guild a try?" Try to elaborate on what the guild is about, but get cut off by more minutes of chatter before arriving at the definitively clear answer: "Maybe."
Jumping ahead in the story, we Tie the Knot (TM) less than three years later. And looking back, viewing our meeting through the proper context, it seems somewhat obvious that we would be a good match, just considering that we were both playing the most popular game in an unusual, illogical, but heavily stylish manner. It's almost as if we both had that Indie spirit from the start. Like we were destined to clasp hands and walk off into the woods together. That whole sore thumb scenario in the Auction House was kind of a big hint, but neither of us saw it at the time. Here's what it looked like when we went back to recreate the image.
Now just imagine forty more characters standing around in a gaggle, all dressed in ugly outfits of brown or gray, and you're practically right there with us, back in vanilla Warcraft in 2006. Those were the days, eh?
Now I do have to warn the guys out there: be careful what you wish for. Selecting a gamer girl may involve getting your ass kicked a bunch of times in video games. Like, you'll probably be better than she is at a bunch of games, probably even more than half, but she may outshine you in others, and whew. Her best games? Just bow at the waist, let her take the lead, and boggle at all the destruction.
Starcraft 2 was such a game. I didn't even want to play it. Real-time Strategy? No thanks. I did play a lot of that genre. (Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, among others). But I played out that genre in the 20th Century. Well, OK. Plus the "aughts", the 2000s, the first half. Before she came along, I was done wanting to play any more RTS. So there she is in Starcraft 2, kicking tails and taking names. Her in-game name was Lady Kiyalynn, so she was not trying to hide her gender. Some of her defeated opponents, or opponents on the way to defeat, would start running their mouths, trash-talking in that genuinely-misogynistic way that only gamer guys with bruised egos can do. Or gamers who didn't even pay attention to her name, just ranting because they hated to lose. And she would be playing so hard, she would forget to eat, so I'd make her a sandwich when I made one for myself and drop it off at her desk. And she would make all of these heart smileys with the Less Than symbol and the number 3 and Unleash the Chat Kraken(TM) upon them, praising how her husband brought her a sandwich and how sweet that was, and just dialing up the clearly-female behaviors to punctuate the fact that these guys just lost to a girl. It was too funny.
So yes, she has a minor cruel streak. (We can all pretend that she's the exception on that front, when it comes to women.) And sometimes it turns toward me. (Woops.)
Starcraft 2 gaming changed over time, though. Modders created tower defense mods, and these became exceedingly popular -- so popular, they spawned a whole new gaming genre out of it. All the tower defense games available now on Steam were crafted after tower defense became popular as a Starcraft mod. She could play those multiplayer contests for hours on end and developed a hunger for trying tower defense games as more came out.
I got roped into playing with her, but only in "crossover" games, where tower defense was combined with something else. There was Sanctum, which combined Tower Defense with First Person Shooter. We still go back to that one from time to time.
There was also Dungeon Defenders, which was Tower Defense combined with Action RPG with Roguelike elements.
I got invited to (or sometimes dragged through) so many Tower Defense medley games that it started to seep into my blood, like a disease. Sometimes we took breaks from World of Warcraft for a while, even years, and had more time to play other games, but we still focused on games that we both liked, for the most part. She gets blamed for this. Of course. Because she taught me how to blame the spouse for all kinds of things under the sun. Deal with that for long enough, and yes, you realize that if you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em. Now she gets blamed for stuff, too, and me having any shred of affinity for tower defense? Her fault. Entirely her fault. I got revenge on her, too. She used to hate fresh mushrooms, hate squash and zucchini, hate all kinds of stuff that we eat all the damned time, now. Ha. She got assimilated into foods, and I got assimilated into Tower Defense.
That still isn't the full irony yet, though.
Because this is the one tower defense that I'm better at than she is. It's like Tower Defense for Men, or something. No cute dice rolls or flowery charts of level-up powers. No cute graphics, no soft music. Just the math. Lots and lots of figuring out the math. She didn't even try to sell it to me, since it's a single player game, only. She was hiding it from me, at least compared to her other tower defense games: never bragging about it, not playing it much.
This was the predecessor game, Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows. It got me. It hooked me. And all those hundreds of Steam Achievements? Wife laughing at me, calling me Achievement Whore for caring about cleaning up every last one. Well, yeah. The mountain is there. Must climb it. I started this mission, dammit, and I am going to finish it. I am going to have at least ONE tower defense game that I've finished all the way out and she hasn't. So take that.
Check out the in-game comment on the final achievement in the list.
Not Chasing Shadows any more! Yeah. Now we're cooking with gems.
(Shadows are the meanest thing in this game. They can visit all manner of nastiness upon you. Proud to say I've slaughtered over a thousand of the things in Frostborn Wrath alone.)
And yes, mastering a tower defense game is no big deal. It's shooting fish in a barrel, over and over. There's no tactics, just pure strategy, and not the deepest amount of that. Losing doesn't cost anything but the time spent trying. Call it a guilty pleasure. I'm allowed.
This was a humbling moment:
These grand achievements I'm chasing will barely qualify me to belong in the top ten percent of players of this game. Not only that, I'm late to the party. Most people who got these done got them done years ago. Nothing special to see here.
Ah, but that's from the gamer's perspective. I'm also a game developer, now. I wasn't a quarter century ago, but I am now. I've been on the inside for so long, parts of me forgot what it's like from the outside. And getting nigh unto ten percent of all who bought a game to spend the time in it to kill a million enemies, five and ten and twenty at a time? ... Not bad.
This may be a niche little game, off the beaten path, but it's beloved by its fans. They not only enjoyed it but were loyal enough to it, drawing enough from it, to play over and over again. That is not a bad performance. Our little indie site, here. If we can do a fraction that well, we will have earned quite a bit of pride. If ten percent of readers who buy one of our books end up buying every word we print? I would take that. So, this little game is nothing to sneeze at.
Uh oh. Look what dropped. I got the last puzzle piece and now I have the whole collection.
I did the grinding, all of the grinding. Well, almost. Look at WHEN this happened:
Yup. The last shape I needed dropped on the next-to-last game. One more game and I'll hit a million, and then this quest will be over.
Be careful slinging around "if God loves me". Like, do it with a bad spirit and you'll get nothing. You'll just get white noise and silence. But what the Hell are you going to do if it lands? You could end up backing yourself into accidentally getting religion. Or something.
The real prize dropped when a sore thumb landed right in front of me in the auction house. That gift has meant the most and had the most impact on my life. And it came along right before I tagged a million, too -- relatively speaking. The road from there to "I do" wasn't a given, either. More things had to line up and fall into place. Not everything important in life can be earned. Sometimes, the only path to success has to be gifted to you. But it's not that simple, either, because-- if I didn't say Hello (or at least try, and land at Hell), the gift just vanishes on the wind. If I gave up there, I lose. If I didn't do something foolish and chase that stranger down in order to talk, I lose. So damned many ways to lose, that if you end up on the top of the mountain, you bloody well deserve to take some victory laps. And who knows if it comes again, or something else like it. Maybe it won't. And not every day has been heaven. We've had a few days of Hell, in the mix. Who doesn't? Life isn't perfect. ... Didn't see this coming, did you? Sometimes you don't. But that's why you play the game.
You play the game.
I couldn't have set up the last piece to fall on perfect timing if I tried a thousand times. I chose this game challenge for my first new game report in over twenty years for other reasons. That little gift was just bonus. I've gotten more than my share of those across my lifetime, which makes for good storytelling. Especially sweet when big luck drops in the middle of a shared adventure. Take advantage of gifted bonuses when you get them.
I promised you this:
That's my shape collection achievement popping in the top corner, at the start of the next game. I didn't play out a game, here, though. I just came to show you the map.
This is field K1 in Frostborn Wrath. It's the only one with Watchtowers, which are needed to score some of the rarest achievements. I put circles where I blocked off the path, to force the enemies to take longer to get to their goal. This ended up being my highest-scoring field in survival, even though its layout is far from ideal. The math just scales up and up and up, the higher you level your wizard. There's an end point of perfection past which the math won't let you push higher, but I came nowhere near that. If there is anything remarkable about my run, it may be that I got all 636 without going much over Wizard Level 1000, which is one of the achievements. Which means, perhaps I got it done with less strength than some did.
Here you can see my final wizard level, along with the filled-in upper half of my map.
Too tiny to see unless you zoom the image? Level 1187. Surely others did it all in less. I had fun, though -- which is the point of playing.
Some players have pushed the game's math to a far more extreme level than I did, orders of magnitude greater in terms of their numbers: score, waves beaten, strongest gem, etc. Kudos to the ones who did the best-ever at various parts of this game. I salute you.
The fields in that image are all fully lit, but there are some in the other half of the map that are not. The game has three modes: campaign, survival, and puzzle. Playing a game out in a given mode at a given field lights up one of the lights on that field, if you win. I can live with some adventures left on the table, though. 636 achievements was enough for me.
I had to grind out one more game to push the number over one million. I did it on the same field, in the same way, as most of the rest of my final grinding push. Field A1, in campaign.
Liking tower defense? My wife's fault. Caring about this game because I want to be better than her at at least ONE tower defense game, and I want receipts to show for it? Her fault. Grinding out the most grindy, boring achievements while she laughs at me the whole way through? Her fault. That I'm back to blogging after a two-decade hiatus? That's her fault, too, but some stories need to wait for another day. (Sorry.)
Made it to the summit. Been here before, though.
Shameless victory lap. But hey, I shot a million fish in a barrel. I get to brag. Right?
You might have to Grind To A Million(TM), or perhaps even past that, to gather up all the achievements and rewards that properly belong to you, but it's worth the work to do so.
See you next time.
- Bob Thomas