Ouer the Edge © September 30 ,2009 Opinion 5 Defense Grid: The Awakening Review HAAKON SULLIVAN STAFF WRITER Tower defense games are available for free pretty much anywhere on the inter- net. What happens when a game com- pany tries to cash in on this Real Time Strategy subgenre? You get something like Defense Grid: The Awakening by Hidden Path entertainment. Defense Grid plays exactly like any other tower defense game: the baddies are mindlessly running to their object- ive and your duty is to build various towers around their path to blow them away before they get there. First you get resources to build towers by killing the bad guys. Then you have to think about what kinds you want to use, when to upgrade them, and where to place them to stop the invaders. That’s the whole game in a nutshell. That’s only one reason why this game seems really bland from an RTS stand- point. Another reason is that the game’s story can be summed up in one sentence. Aliens are attacking your homeworld and you discover and AI who is willing to help you defend the planet but you need to defend his power cores from the alien invasion. That’s it. It doesn’t develop at all past that sentence. In most other RTSs they at least try give you a fleshed out reason why you need to blow stuff up. Also, you have this AI assistant who starts having weird war flashbacks in the middle of your game and begins to babble on about his lost comrades. The game is also based on a purely defensive strategy. This just makes the game feel only half done since most other RTSs try to balance out your defensive and offensive options. Sit- ting there just waiting for the aliens to wander through your defenses can get boring pretty fast. It’s more fun to rush your opponent or swarm him with tanks. So to make this game entertaining you have to look at it for what it is and that is a tower defense game and not a com- plete RTS game. It does a good job of this in quite a few ways. First of all, the levels are beautifully designed both graphically and _ stra- tegically. The levels are awesome looking since it borrows the Gamebryo engine which was used in Fallout 3, Oblivion, Civ 4, etc. and each level is built in such a way that you have change up your strategy for each one. One level may require you to maze your enemies to slow them down and in another may need you to do as much damage as possible as they walk their path. There are twenty of these stages and each has different modes of play after you beat them on “story” mode. This can create many hours of play for strategy addicts out there. The variety of towers is also a big plus to the game. You have towers like your basic machine gun, flaming inferno towers, and slowing temporal towers (to name a few) to help you kill off those buggers. An annoying aspect of the towers though is that the game enforces the line of sight rule for most of the towers so they can’t shoot over each other. This can lead to some glitches where a tower keeps on trying to shoot at an alien it can’t hit instead of firing at a good target. The enemies in the game are also nicely varied. You have your basic little minions which go down with a few bullets, you have cowards who are shielded, you have ugly bird things that fly, and you have giants who can take quite a beating. There are many more kinds of aliens and each of them require a certain strategy to take down (like those fast ****ers who keep on taking my cores). One neat feature of this game is that they give you a large orbital laser to blast away a large portion of the enemy force every few minutes. You don’t get any money from doing this but if you screwed up somewhere and the enemy is running off of the map with your cores it’s nice to blow them apart across the map. The music in this game also deserves mentioning. It has a good sci fi feel combined with a patriotic feel. This is kind of weird when you have no damn clue as to what planet you’re defend- ing. Sound effects are well done as well with each tower upgrade having a distinct sound. The aliens are unusual- ly quiet though. Pa TE EFeRSeesRID STH E=AW A KEN EN Getting to Carbon Negative and Why That Is Good. Green Talk THOMAS CHENEY STAFF WRITERS I know this is an environment- al column and environmental issues are, to put it politely, pretty f****** negative. How- ever, there is one kind of nega- tive that we should all feel positive about and that is the transition to a carbon negative society. Carbon negativity es- sentially means that an organ- ization, country or even an entire globe absorbs more car- bon dioxide than it emits. The challenge that it presents is that it requires is the environmental movement and governments to recognize the fact that the con- centration of carbon dioxide have exceed safe limits and that a technological fix is needed now. If it is relatively clear that our society needs to move from a carbon belching society to one which practices climate restora- tion by actively removing car- bon dioxide from the atmos- phere due the fact that there is already a dangerous amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate restoration is indeed a complex act as there are wide variety of anthropogenic (hu- man) sources such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and some other gases as well as soot to deal with this. The most significant one right now is car- bon dioxide and due to its long atmospheric lifetime of over a century, it can quickly accumu- late and threaten the climatic system that our society is based on. Methods of removing car- bon dioxide include concepts such as Terra Petra (charcoal in soil), as well as burning biomass and then capturing and burying the combustion gases. Finally we have the option of the cre- ation of artificial carbon sinks using synthetic trees which use various chemical processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then bury- ing it underground. One of the more innovative processes comes from Dr. Aldo Stienfeld at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland which proposes to use solar en- ergy and calcium hydroxide to capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using parabolic through to concentrate solar en- ergy to drive the carbon captur- ing process. Another approach to directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to burn bio- mass and capture the carbon dioxide and then bury it. Such an approach would make meet- ing a 350 parts per million tar- get of carbon dioxide 20 trillion dollars cheaper than one with- out any Carbon Capture and Storage. However, there using biomass would only have a net present value of 7 trillion dol- lars. Considering that the cur- rent business as usual path on climate change likely entails reducing the number of people that the earth can support from 9 billion to less 1 Billion the cost of climate action (in econom- ics costs borne in the future are considered less important than current cost) is less than 1000 dollars per human-life capacity. saved The only big catch is that it would require 500 Mil- lion hectares of woody biomass plantations to grow the fuel and absorb the carbon. In any case, the combination of strong pub- lic policy, international agree- ments and technology makes climate action quite affordable. Considering that COP 15, the most important conference that will hopefully develop a inter- Tomorrow’s Professionals Apply | OMSAS Today! 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