RottenWorks

The most innovative 3D tower defense game of the year! Defend the town of UnDeadwood in this hilarious slapstick horror game with a western twist.

As the new Sheriff in charge of defending the town, hire a wild posse of Cowboys and Cowgirls for your fight against the undead hordes. Upgrade and reposition them to defend against wave after wave of zombies who are hell bent on destroying the town.
Unlike most tower defense games, you need to protect your cowboys from attack by positioning them on rooftops.
However, the Zombies destroy the buildings, diminishing the safe places you can choose to place Cowboys on. You will have to choose when to repair a building and when to abandon a building and fall back to a better position. If the zombies destroy all of buildings, they will come after the Sheriff and you lose.

Meet the Posse:
Pistol Packin Cowboys – these young, dumb, sons-of-guns are your basic gun for hire. A good base unit with great upgrades to both speed and damage.
Shotgun Shootin Cowboys – the Shotgun Shooters are older and wiser than their Pistol Packin brethren, and a little more ornery too. Shotgun Shootin Cowboys can blast multiple zombies at once.
The Prospector – this crazy old coot has spent far too much time underground packin dirt in his ears. He can be a little reckless – tossing sticks of lit dyn-o-mite into a crowd of zombies – but he sure does get the job done.
Fannie Smokely – the sharpest sharpshooter in Wild Ol Bill’s Wildest of Wild West Shows! Fannie Smokely can shoot the stink off a dog at 800 yards with her trusty huntin’ rifle Sally May.

Features:
- Hire more cowboys, upgrade their guns, or repair the damaged buildings you are defending – each decision will have lasting effects on your strategy!
- Progress through colorful game areas, going from "A Fistful of Zombies", through "Little Zombies on the Prairie" and up to "The Great Brain Robbery" in your quest to cleanse UnDeadwood of the zombie menace!
- 2 unique views! Rotate the phone for either a top-down view of the action, or the cinematic street view!

We love this game and are really excited about getting it out there for you to play. We’ve got lots more content we plan to roll out as soon as we get’er done.
We are already working hard on the next update and look forward to hearing your feedback.

For the uninitiated, which I was, Carmilla is a Gotchic (read saucy) novella that was originally published in 1872 and is believed by many to be the foundation upon which Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. It certainly has all the elements such as shape shifting, neck biting, seduction, rising from the grave, a vampire slayer and of course the hunting of the vampire to drive a stake through the heart.

In this story, we have a female vampire that is seducing and then taking the life of female victims. Considering the time period this book was written in that alone makes this quite a risqué story. Carmilla is the mysterious stranger who has to be rescued after her horse and cart meet with an accident. Her mother has urgent business and can’t spare the time to stop and take care of her child so she leaves her in the care of Laura and her father. (Apparently babysitting was much different back in the late 1800’s). To add to the mystery Carmilla’s mother has forbidden her from speaking of their past or their destination. She even tells Laura’s father not to ask about them right before she rides off.

As you may expect, once Carmilla is around all sorts of strange things begin to happen. First off, Laura recognizes Carmilla from dreams she had over a decade ago. Additionally, Carmilla begins to seduce Laura, lavishing her with praise and stirring up odd feelings in her. When some old restored photos show up at the house they’re amazed to find that one of the pictures looks exactly like Carmilla. Of course, the portrait was done over a hundred years ago. (You always know that’s a bad sign. There is also the other subtle sign of Carmilla sleeping all day and disappearing at night.)

Ironically there is a malady going around the village where young girls are becoming sick and dying. In some cases the young girls only live a couple of days. It’s not too far of a leap to guess that Laura gets this same malady and becomes increasingly pale and lethargic. Doctors are brought in but they fear something more supernatural is going on. This leads to an investigation, a hunt and stories of more girls suffering in the same way as Laura. Pretty soon it’s obvious Carmilla isn’t who she claims to be nor is she anywhere near as young as anyone thinks.

If anything, this is a condensed version of Dracula and is really quite good. It has the same first person narrative style told by the victim (although Dracula brings in a lot more characters and many different forms of telling the story) and has many of the same elements; which it should considering it was written first. There is a lot of interesting lore to gather from this story, and clearly sets up the vampire legend. If you have a chance and want to get to the origins of the vampire, this is worth reading.

Carmilla on Librivox
Carmilla on Wikipedia

Since I’m already in my Halloween mood, I just finished reading the original Dracula. In actuality I listened to it as an audiobook from Librivox.org. I’ve been listening to it for the past several days at the office while I did my regular work. It’s a really good recording and well worth the time.

It was terribly good fun, but it was almost laughable at how different the actual book is versus what we have come to know "about" the book. Taking a step back, the original Dracula starring Bela Legosi (or any other rendition really) is nothing like the original story. In the main novel Dracula shows up for the first two chapters while revealing his plans to Harker and then all but disappears for the rest of it. He does show up here and there to deliver a few lines but otherwise we "feel" his presence rather than see his person.

Another thing that really caught me was the idea that Dracula is a handsome seducer that merely has to look at women and they fall under his spell. There is certainly seduction in the very early stages of the novel and the idea of sexuality is obviously prevalent, but you don’t actually see Dracula running around bending the will of women and luring them. His actions are very much out of sight and you only see some of the end result.

To take it step further, Dracula isn’t even a main character in the original. We barely see him, we mainly hear of his deeds and the fear he causes. If anything, Dr. Seward and Van Helsing are the main characters with Mina and John Harker having major supporting roles. Everything is about the hunt for Dracula not their interaction with him. Even the "final showdown" barely has Dracula involved. Van Helsing and group cross the vast oceans on a long trek, then make their attack against the gypsies that are protecting Dracula. But once they fight off the gypsies, Dracula is defenseless and is killed without putting up and sort of fight. There is no mortal struggle between Van Helsing and Dracula as we see so often.

I also found it humorous that Dracula is killed with a knife in the heart and not a wooden stake as we are all so accustomed to. And let’s not forget that lopping off of the head bit. That usually gets left out. To graphic for television? Hard to say.

We all know the "legend" of Dracula, but this was a great reminder that the legend and the original story aren’t really that similar. Anyone else agree or am I out on a limb here?

I was watching Season 1 of the X-Files over the weekend (ah, the nostalgia of it all) and the thing I found funny was the use of the word paranormal. In this specific case (and we all know how popular the X-Files became, and still is) paranormal almost exclusively meant UFOs and aliens. There were plenty of genetic mutation episodes but the main crux was of course the aliens and the abductions. Yes, yes, government conspiracies and cover-ups too. Stay focused.

Jump ahead a few years and the term paranormal is almost unanimously associated with ghosts and spirits. You don’t hear too much about flying objects anymore, but everyone seems to be having ghost sightings. Seems like just about every other home in the country is haunted these days. Libraries have sprits. Schools, jails, asylums, factories and even lighthouses have them.

Just funny how the same term has come to mean something completely different, at least to me anyway. Mulder had people looking to the sky, while Jason and Grant have people looking under the bed. Anyone else noticed the same thing?