Desktop Tower Defense
A Tower Defense online Flash game made by the Casual Collective that, along with Flash Element Tower Defense, launched a huge flood of online tower defense games. Can be played here, in several versions.
Tropes used in Desktop Tower Defense include:
- Airborne Mook: Flying creeps.
- Asteroids Monster: Spawn creeps split when they die. In early levels they split only once, creating non-splitting child creeps (now called spawnlets). In later levels they split twice. And the Boss Spawn creeps at the end split three times.
- Boss Game: You can select a "bosses only" game mode.
- Casual Video Game
- Death Course: Inverted, you're setting up one instead of taking one.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: One of the main strategies, and arguably less effective than most other strategies.
- Difficulty Levels
- Dungeon Bypass: Flying Creeps do this.
- Excuse Plot: The creeps are trying to get across your desk. Stop them. (The developer says that the creeps are trying to steal your colored paperclips, which raises more questions than it answers.)
- Follow the Leader: Tower defense is a fairly widespread genre of online casual game now.
- House Rules: Several players prefer "No Juggle" or "No _insert tower here_" games. Something about them being overpowered.
- Just One More Level: The developer has admitted to deliberately tweaking his game to encourage more play.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Dark creeps absorb instead of take the first 20 points of damage per shot; Immune creeps cannot be slowed by Frost towers.
- Mini Boss / King Mook: Boss creeps are larger versions of normal creeps.
- Numerical Hard: Aside from lengthening the amount of waves you have to survive depending on level, hard mode creeps have more hitpoints than easy or medium mode creeps.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: Tower-limited runs, "no mazing" runs, overlapping with House Rules when extended to multiplayer.
- Stat-O-Vision: Click on a tower and the stats panel will show its attributes and allow you to upgrade it. Click on a creep and the stats panel shows how much health it has left.
- Speed Run: "Sprint Mode" times you and, assuming you have an account, puts you in comparison with other people. The current "normal mode" record is approximately four and a half minutes.
- Tower Defense: Type 2 (Dynamic Mazing).
- Whoring: For some reason, a complex of Dart and Boost towers does slightly more damage for the money than any other configuration. As such, everyone uses it.