Druid and Super monkeys – Main damage dealers

The challenge throws the player into round 50 with a dart monkey, a boomerang monkey and 15k of cash. You will find yourself on a map that doesn’t have a lot of distance to defend adding to the difficulty of the rather tight budget.

This guide is based on the druid monkey (2-5-0) and the super monkey (2-5-0) as the main damage dealers. You should have therefore unlocked the full paths of both of them. Should you not be ready yet, play a few normal maps on hard difficulty and use these towers to gain experience points for them. Speaking of druids it also makes sense to equip Obyn as the hero as it buffs druids.

Video Guide – Protect The Yacht

The detailed way of beating this challenge would be too difficult to describe round for round which is why we made a video guide that you can follow more easily. The main concept of the winning strategy is explained below in text form.

Monkey village – Supermonkey on SALE!

On the first round in the challenge you only get 15k to work with. You can use this money more effectively by buying the (0-0-2) monkey village which reduces the cost of all monkeys and upgrades (up to tier 3) by 10%. This allows you to buy the middle path Super monkey which is able to destroy the MOAB and the rest of the bloons with ease. This trick will also save you some money later in the game.

Druid of the Storm – Time maker

As mentioned earlier, the track of the blooms is extremely short in comparison to other maps. If large waves of blooms are rushing in your main damage dealer will not have enough time to blast them all away. The strategy here is to place two druid (3-2-0) of the storm monkeys right at the end of the straight part of the track where they will push the bloons back on the track giving the supermonkey more time to pop them.

Helicopter monkey – short term MOAB defense

Im sure there are more elegant ways to defend of the large numbers of fortified MOABs rushing through at later stages of the game but the helicopter monkey on the lower path allows for a very effective destruction that once again leverages the effect of the main damage dealers by pushing the bloons back and giving more time to attack them.

The Ultimate Solution – 5th tier Druid and 5th tier Super Monkey

Although it seems scary selling all you towers off, the (2-5-0) Druid is definitely worth it. Thanks to its carpet of spikes along the whole way this monkey deals with however many ceramics you can throw at it.

Furthermore in combination with the added super monkeys it easily deals with MOABs too. The 5th tier super monkey for the final rounds is basically just the cherry on top to make sure nothing is coming through. Don’t forget to miss using its power at the right time though or you will have a rather bad day.

Summary

The Protect the Yacht challenge is without a doubt a quite difficult one to master. This guide hopefully helped you to find a way through the bloon rounds or gave you inspiration for your own tactic. Either way have fun playing!

If you are interested in more BTD6 content please check out our other walk through/guides here or view all our BTD6 content here.

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The Nintendo Switch single handily revived and revolutionized portable consoles upon its release in 2017. The console was immensely popular and thanks to its ease of use, compatibility and multifunctionality very successful. Somehow Sony was still recovering from its PSVita disaster and had enough of portable consoles making the Steam Deck in 2022 the first real competitor in the space. And even then calling it a competitor is not quite fair either as it has a completely different use case. Anyway, the portable game console market really started to take off with many manufacturers building similar devices. The true original didn’t change much apart from an OLED version released somewhere in between. This is now set to change though!

Lots of fuzz around the release date

According to some leaked sources the new Switch could potentially launch sometime next month (October 2024). Some even say that the mass production of the console is already fully ready and running. Other say it will not happen this year and we can count on a release later in 2025. I personally think that we can expect a release in early 2025. A release this year seems rather unlikely although Nintento could also try to time the Christmas sales. It will remain of course unknown until Nintendo releases an official note.

What changes?

How does it look? What are the changes? These are all questions that we get increasingly more answers to with all of the leaks currently coming through. Regarding the looks there have been some leaked images that could very well be the actual design. Compared to its predecessor the new switch could come with a cleaner more sharp cornered style. The generall layout should stay the same though. According to multiple sources the joycons on the new switch will attach magnetically and feature one extra button each.

Battery life and performance are still unknown although some leaks hinted at the specifiactions of the device. One pictures shows what seems to be a rather small battery compartment in a Switch 2 prototype having some worried the battery life would be lacking behind but we don’t have any confirmed battery size ratings yet.

A leak of the hardware specifications notes the SOC as the model: GMLX30-R-A1 which could hint at another Nvidia Tegra chip in the handheld. This will be paired with 12GB of RAM and apparently 265GB of storage. We will have to wait for more leaks or official information to know for sure though and even then there could be different storage/performance tiers. Furthermore the leaks hint at a dual fan setup to cool the chip.

Switch 2 – the refresh we waited for?

The hard truth is we still don’t know the exact release dates and specs but the leaks hint at a quite promising handheld console that could bring fresh air into the increasingly PC only market. The buffed up cooling and new NVIDIA chip also hint at a big increase in performance although that will be only useful when there are enough good games released that will take advantage of the extra increase.

Whether the Switch 2 will be released next month or in a year, fans can be excited for an interesting release of the successor to one of the most successful handheld consoles of recent years.

Shapez is a factory building game with a really simple to understand game mechanic. Create shapes of all colors and forms and thats it. Sounds boring? You would be absolutely wrong. Never underestimate the addiction potential of this endless world with limitless possibilities for automation structures. Lets have a closer look!

General Information – small dev studios for the win

Shapez has been released in June 2020 by the single developer Tobias Springer. Its steam page boasts overwhelmingly positive reviews and with its current price tag of 10 € (half that in a good sale) the first impressions are already good. Note also that the game has just gotten a successor whose graphics have been massively updated and have been transformed in to 3D.

Gameplay – Factory here, Automation there

The gameplay of shapez is quite simple and self explanatory also eliminating the need for overly long introductions at the beginning. You simply rotate, color, stack and cut shapes that exist in random spots on the map to feed a central hub in the middle of the map via conveyor belts. The hub changes the shapes it requires from you to get to the next level each time. For example to get from level 1 to 2 you need to feed it 30 gray circles. With increasing levels the shapes get increasingly complex and in turn require increasingly complex and large production factories. With each level you unlock a new possibility to edit the shapes color, orientation, place and so on. Going to the extremes you can even go completely crazy and build whole computers in this cute looking game.

The main factory blocks are the extractor (1) which harvests the random on the map occurring spots of shapes and colors, the conveyor belt (2) which moves harvested items/shapes from one spot to another, the coloring module (3) which inputs a shape and a color and colors the shape in this color, the cut module (4) which halves the input shape into two pieces and the turn module (5) which rotates a shape 90°. As you can see there aren’t that many and they are not very difficult to understand. This original simplicity that quickly evolves into complex and tightly build automation machines is exactly the factor which makes this game so appealing and addictive. Try it out yourself and you will soon want to build more and more complex factories as if it lies in the human nature to automate everything we see.

Graphics – Simple 2D top down style

Shapez works with a simple top down style 2D graphics style and focuses more on the gameplay mechanics than the textures. I personally like the minimalistic design not just for its clean look but also for its performance. Even with quite a few buildings and automations set up the game runs well and smooth even on older hardware. That said the game can absolutely run on work laptops such as the Thinkpad x270 but if you actually want to achieve any work i would rather recommend you not to install it :).

For performance reasons the game switches between two modes depending you zoom in on the map. If you zoom out it switches to a map mode in which you can not build and buildings and any items on conveyor belts are not rendered. For me personally this was a bit annoying as i wanted to have a better view of the surrounding factories while building the current one. But don’t worry the dev though of that:

Modding capability – Mods keep game alive

We talk quite a bit about mods on here and that for a reason: Mods keep games alive. The most popular example is the all known king of computer games Minecraft. For our detailed explanation look here. But also Kerbal Space Program 1 is a perfect example for a game that even lives on after its successor has been released thanks to an incredible modding community that has extended the possibilities in graphics and gameplay mechanics again and again over the years.

Luckily the dev of Shapez also included modding capability into the game which allows you to browse through a large assortment of different mods including one that changes the zoom point in which the map view kicks in. Its simply brilliant when game developers include functions like these.

Summary – great game with addiction danger

Shapez is a well made game with a very reasonable price point when you wait for one of the many steam sales. Its simple but clean graphics style allows it to run well on older and less powerful hardware. Combined with the addicting nature of its automation gameplay which lets you want to build ever more complex and expanding factories across the whole map this game make for a great time killer for long train rides or flights. Also thanks to its integrated modding capability the game even allows you to customize it to your liking and has a passionate community.

Get Shapez here:

From 04.09.2024 until 09.09.2024 (10am PT) the popular game distribution platform Steam is once again blessing all PC gamers with some really nice discounts on space themed games. Lets have a look through some of the most interesting ones from the bunch to help you decide which might be worth your hard earned money.

Universe Sandbox 19.42€ (-33%) – Play around with the Solar System

Searching for a fun physics simulator? Look no further. Universe Sandbox is a full on Sandbox game where you can tweak and change any parameters of the environment and the planets, suns, black holes, comets and more. You can spawn and create any astronomical object that comes to your mind and let them collide and interact with each other. Furthermore you can actually learn quite a few things about orbital mechanics from this game.

SpaceEngine 20.29€ (-30%) – The entire Universe on your Harddrive

SpaceEngine while in some parts similar to Universe Sandbox offers a much more open world approach. You can understand Universe Sandbox as a physics simulation while SpaceEngine doesn’t as such allow collisions and focuses more on the scientifically accurate 3D star map of the known universe. Another aspect that differentiates the two are the graphics. SpaceEngine is incredibly beautiful to look at with much more nuanced texture details.

No Man’s Sky 23.59€ (-60%) – Classic Universe exploration game

To be fair, the above two games are more simulations than games. But no worries, while No Mans Sky plays in a fictional Universe it still offers a vast space to explore. Because the game has a unique engine that generates planets and their ecosystems as you proceed there is effectively no way that you will ever run out of parts of the universe to discover. No Mans Sky is focused on discovery, survival and crafting allowing players to choose their own path through the universe.

Everspace 2 19.99€ (-60%) – Spaceship RPG shooter

Everspace 2 is a single-player space shooter that blends acction with RPG elects like looting, crafting and mining. You are the pilot of a spaceship that battles outlaws while exploring different regions of space. As the story progresses you upgrade you ship and encounter more difficult enemys. Aside from the good gameplay the graphics are also really good. You can read our more in depth test of this game here.

Spaceflight Simulator 5.99€ (-50%) – simple 2D spaceflight physics sim

Spaceflight Simulator is graphically very simple 2D game that allows you to build your own rockets and launch them to the stars. It can be seen as the two dimensional brother of KSP. But don’t underestimate the quite accurate physics engine behind the simple textures. With its Map view this game teaches the basics of orbital dynamics and rocket physics quite well and allows for a simple entry in simulation games. You can read our more detailed review of the game here. Should you struggle with some of the Moon missions check out our guide here.

Bonus: Kerbal Space Program 9.99€ (-70%) – Ultimate Spaceflight Game

Even though KSP is now quite old and already has a successor i still recommend this classic over the new KSP 2 where the development seems to have stopped. KSP is a classic all in one Spaceflight Simulation Game in which you can build your own rocket from a huge selection of rocket parts and steer it through the solar system to the planets. While this game might look childish, it packs quite a punch when it comes to the level of realism and with it the level of complexity to pull off a successful moon landing. Above all it is also heavily modable with a huge community developing mods for it. Check out our detailed guide on how to do this here.

In this small guide we’ll show you how to acquire all 12 achievements in Cat Quest I.

Lets begin with the ones you can achieve in a normal playthrough:

Felingrad Loremaster

Simply Complete the main quest. As easy as that.

Dungeon Master and Power of the Arcane

Check out this nice overview of dungeons and golden chest on the Cat Quest Fandom. The map also displays the Arcane Temples needed to acquire all spells / skills.
https://cat-quest.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons

Saviour of the Cats

If you haven’t already completed all side quest during your normal playthrough check out all quest boards or use this list to find any you’re missing.

Super Catventurer

Head towards the Furbidden Fields and catnap at the Last Rest. Farm the skulls in the Furbiden Fields, they reward around 2.4k xp each. Once you killed all return to the main menu and reload your safe, making them spawn all over again. Just repeat until you gained enough levels.

Fashionista Lion

If you’re still missing some gear pieces check if you opened all golden chests. If yes. head towards the blacksmith Kit Cat and purchase as many of the 50 gold chest as you can until you get the item. (according to some steam users this may take some time) If you’re running into a financial problem, visit the founders island and farm the founders cave. Each run will give you around 1500 gold if you focus on the chest in the center. (thanks nullpointerat)
Check out this steam guide by Dwolfy to get a list of all gear pieces and where to get them.

Furry Armored, Naked Cat, Stronger Enemies, Nine Lives, Level One

Let’s continue with the ones relating to the mew game mode, a more challenging, shortened playthrough variant of the game. In this mode you can select modifiers that effect your gameplay. Simply complete the game with the one matching the achievement name and you’ll get the achievement.

We’re currently working on a walkthrough guide for mew game and will link it here once we’ve completed the article.

The Old Master

You get this once you completed 3 mew game runs with 1, 2 and 3 modifiers.

Following our last selection of great BTD6 towers, here are another bunch of actually good but underrated towers and upgrade paths in the popular tower defense game Bloons TD 6. Many people underestimate these but with the right tactic they can be an integral part of the defense.

Spike Factory

To avoid a disaster, build a Spike Factory near the exit. Any balloon camouflaged, lead, or otherwise will fail over spikes with the right upgrade. Especially for new players, the “set it and forget it” nature of spike factorys is really convenient. Furthermore you can build and level this for surprisingly little money. The upper upgrade path combined with the middle one offers great all around damage (3-2-0) and for a perfect mid game last line of defense.

Monkey Ace

Complex maps are known for sending balloon waves down multiple paths. Most towers can’t cover both paths simultaneously, but a Monkey Ace in the center of the map deals with bloons everywhere. Upgrades allow the Monkey Ace to destroy camouflaged balloons and increase the fire power. Single-target towers will be needed, but the Monkey Ace is the best mid round tower for these maps as it offers whole map coverage.

And while in its standard form the ace doesn’t shoot aimed arrows meaning it is nearly useless for early rounds, in the later game when your whole screen is covered with bloons anyway it is the perfect mass damage dealer. In this case the upper upgrade path (4-0-2) is ideal.

Alchemist

The Alchemist boosts damage when popping Ceramic, Lead, and MOAB balloons. As a mainly support tower it most importantly buffs nearby towers strongly, making it a crucial finishing touch for most strategies. The Alchemist can make a little extra money by converting lead bloons (and later even rubber bloons) into gold (0-0-4) and placing acid pools on the tracks. Despite its support role, this tower is the cherry on top of most effective tactics on the most challenging difficulty levels as it greatly increases the popping power of your main damage dealers when upgraded to the upper path (3-0-0).

Druid Monkey

If you haven’t used the druid monkey much so far this is undoubtedly the most impressive out of this list. Starting with the third upgrade on the middle path “druid of the jungle” the tower spawns thorns that grab bloons anywhere on the track and break them down until they’re gone.

While this itself is already a powerful feature to have, the tier 5 middle path upgrade “spirit of the forest” is the reason why this tower is such a huge area damage dealer. Once upgraded the druid covers the track of the map in thorns that deal increasingly more damage the closer the track is to the tower. Furthermore the top path of the druid has the ability to push bloons back to the start of the track while Avatar of Wrath on the bottom path buffs other druids and is best used in whole groups of this tower.

Overall the druid might be one of the most versatile towers in the game while still offering a cheap start and good option for earlier rounds.

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What was Flash Player?

Flash player was a popular software for displaying multimedia content in the browser. This included videos, audio, animations and also small games. Some of the most popular include line rider (a simple game where you draw the hill for a sled rider to ride down), Desktop tower defense (a classic tower defense game), the original cookie clicker, crush the castle (a more realistic version of Angry birds) but also simple multiplayer games like territory wars. Furthermore, the early bloon tower defense ran in the browser using flash player the same way the popular, quite violent mini sandbox game happy wheels made its way onto many screens across all homes and schools :).

To sum it up, flash player was the solid foundation to many of the fun early day browser games that we know till today.

But why was it discontinued?

By bringing so much fun to the people and therefore traffic and more importantly money to computers around the world, one would rightfully ask why Adobe Flash player was turned off in December 2020. Although many reasons lead to the final decision, the Flash player had serious security reasons that made computers using the software very prone to hacking. With increasing age more and more vulnerabilities came to light and the amount of developers using flash player for their projects decreased with it. Therefore in 2017 Adobe finally decided it was not worth it to keep Flash player running and discontinued it.

Bring back the memories

But don’t worry all the memories are not gone forever! The free open source software Flashpoint Archive allows you to download a separate, easy to use environment in which you can use, download and play thousands of old Flash Player games! The environment itself is only taking up around 3GB of space while the individual game themselves are obviously just a few MB as they were meant to be played in Browsers. You could even download the whole archive with more than a Terabyte of old Flash Player games.

Check out this free to use portal to old times of the internet and play some of you favorite childhood games!

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Bloons Tower Defense 6 requires strategic tower placement to fend off waves of balloons. Mastering the game’s mechanics is challenging but rewarding, and there are many towers and upgrades. This article covers some of the best towers and upgrades advanced players recommend for battlefield success.

The lucrative Banana Farm and versatile Wizard Monkey each have unique strengths and abilities to help players defend against all the bloons. There is a tower for every strategy and playstyle, whether you want to boost your banana income, up your attacks, or support your other towers.

Banana Farm

Banana Farms are a necessity to reach higher rounds We need a few of these placed in the middle rounds to afford many upgrades.

Players can choose upgrades that automatically collect bananas as it is painfully annoying to collect them all by hand. If you have a banana farmer, which you can get for a small sum of in game monkey money, you can max out the first path for a maximum production banana farm (5-2-0). If you dont have a farmer it makes more sense to go the third path as the market place auto collects (0-2-4).

Wizard Monkey

The wizard monkey tower meets many criteria for being good. Its instant damage, range, and damage over time abilities help take down challenging targets. On the third path (0-0-4) the Wizard Monkey can revive balloons and send these “zombie” allies backward toward the entrance. Denser and more complicated waves give the Wizard Monkey endless balloons to throw at the enemies.

Super Monkey

Sometimes the higher difficulties try to cram too many balloons at a time leaving beginners feeling hopeless. It’ll take something with more fire power to stop the waves.

Regarding speed nothing beats the power of the Super Monkey. Even on rather low upgrades like (2-2-0) the super monkey is a great tower with incredible shooting power and very far range. Upgrade the first path for even more popping power and you have the ultimate high round work machine.

Monkey Village

Many great monkey towers can’t target camouflage or lead balloons. The solution: the monkey village on the second path (0-2-0) in close proximity. Place all your towers around it and let the magic happen.

But this support structure offers even more. The bottom track boosts players’ economies, and the top track boosts range and monkey attack speed. When used correctly, this can therefore be one of the most powerful towers on the map.

Heli Pilot

The Heli Pilot is valid on all maps because it can follow the bloons with the top upgrade path (2-0-0). Heli Pilot becomes essential on epic maps with changing courses, spawn points, and exits. You can benefit from being in front of every balloon when it spawns, regardless of the position of your main damage dealers.

Beast Handler

Players disagree on the Beast Handler. It is mostly viewed as a very useless tower that doesn’t deal enough damage and isn’t worth it among the many great options the game offers. In my opinion this needs to corrected as the beast handler quite definitely packs a punch with its possibility to combine many separate towers. Take look at our detailed run down for more information.

Tack Shooter

Veterans claim the Tack Shooter is the most underrated tower in Bloons TD 6. It my not sink giant MOAB class blimps or deal huge damage but in the right position it offers a cheap option to get rid of many smaller balloons hordes with ease. This works great in early and mid-rounds when thicker balloon waves stack. Later in the game the Tack Shooter doesn’t destroy the blimps but usually deals well with the smaller balloons they are filled with.

Monkey Buccaneer

Buccaneers are very versatile and can even become aircraft carriers that shoot planes all over the track or make money while attacking, which is an excellent early strategy for players who don’t want to use banana farms.

The Pirate Lord, the middle path tier 5 Buccaneer, can grab MOAB-class blooms without popping them, making this one of the most powerful towers in the whole game. Upgraded in the right way, this tower is also able to work without any support towers as it is able to hit any bloon type with ease.

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Bodycam is a brand new first-person shooter game that has been released on the 7th June. Since its release it has taken the Steam world by storm with over 16k online players. This ultra-realistic title which runs on Unreal Engine 5 puts players in the perspective of law enforcement officers on a mission. And while the photorealistic graphics of the game are stunning good they are also sparking debates about ethics and the portrayal/interaction with violence.

Blurring lines between real and game world

If you haven’t seen footage of the game let me summarize it like this: sometimes real life has worse graphics. Jokes aside the realism this game provides comes close to the early UE5 Unrecord game teasers we have seen one year ago. And while Unrecord has not been released yet Bodycam is right now available on Steam for everyone to download. Similar to the idea of Unrecord the players navigate tense situations, need to make fast decisions and utilize really good tactics. As the name implies the perspective of the game is from a bodycam, a growing technology in actual law enforcement, situated on the shoulder of a police officer. While this whole experience is incredibly immersive and may early reviews praise the game for it there are also other voices questioning if game can not be too real. The ever old discussions if the violence in video games can be differentiated enough from real life (especially from younger players) rises to new levels when the game increasingly looks like the reality.

Morality and use of Force

The in-game scenarios place players in morally difficult situations. When to use force? How to de-escalate tense encounters? These are complex decisions real police officers face daily. Critics argue that games like Bodycam simplify these ambiguous situations, potentially giving players a wrong perception of police work and the appliance of force. In the end nobody knows if people even want their video games to be so realistic or if a bit of distance to the real life might be desirable…

Round up

Despite the controversial takes on this new game it is safe to say that from a graphics standpoint this truly is the future of photorealistic games. An while the game is currently still more of a playable tech demo of Unreal Engine 5 it shows what is possible with these new technologies. Additionally it should also be noted that this game is made by two very young developers (17 and 20). Big respect to them for creating such a innovative and interesting technology demo. It will be truly fascinating what kind of realism levels UE5 will be able to accomplish.

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This years Computex, a leading tech show in Taipeh (Taiwan), has been dominated by one clear topic: AI. Anyone has now heard of ChatGPT but this simple to use AI chat bot might just be the start. Looking at the offerings from the PC industry one might realize that this wave is going to hit earlier than expected.

A new era of the PC: AI PCs

The future of the PC will be an ultimate AI PC that acts a copilot to everything you do on it. This at least is the vision of the coming year that many tech companies believe in. Acer for example unveiled their latest laptops boasting built-in AI capabilities. These AI PCs promise to revolutionize how we work by anticipating user needs and learning from past behavior to improve work flow, efficiency and our interactions with PCs. AI assistants could manage background tasks, adjust settings for better battery life or even predict what files you’ll need next.

Combine this with features like Microsofts Recall and we are getting increasingly close to the future of the personal computer that is so personal it might as well be a human inside you device.

Powering this AI future

Chipmakers like Intel and AMD are also unveiling next-generation processors specifically designed for AI applications. After Qualcomm Snapdragon took on the PC world the non-ARM manufacturers now need to compete with the new Player. These new processors come with significant performance boosts and maybe even more important improved power efficiency gains. Apart from the CPU and GPU performance the NPU, the neural processing unit, is getting increasing attention. These processors are optimized for AI models and act as AI accelerators for locally running models rather than cloud computing.

Back to the Real World

The AI hype is undeniable and with an increasingly inflating AI bubble the question remains how many of all these buzz words are actually here to stay and revolutionize the way we interact with devices and the world. The theoretical possibilities are seemingly endless.

Computex 2024 paints a clear picture: AI is no longer science fiction and here to stay to fundamentally the importance of technology and our interaction with it. In the end, time will show how much of this enormous AI wave is going to reach the shore.