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'South Park' kids defend their tower

Crude animated TV show now a tower-defense game

by scott sloan ssloan@herald-leader.com,

Screw you, guys ... I'm protecting my home?

The familiar ring of "Screw you guys, I'm going home" has taken a bit of a turn in one of the newest entries on the Xbox Live Arcade — South Park: Let's Go Tower Defense Play!

Sure enough, Eric Cartman is now found protecting the town of South Park in this take on tower defense games. Cartman recruits his friends, although he would never call them that, and constructs weapons to rid the town of the likes of Ginger Kids, Jakovasaurs, Old People and Sixth Graders.

The tower-defense genre of gaming has been around for some time and centers on building weapon towers to repel the onslaughts of enemies. The standard-bearer is PixelJunk Monsters, released in 2008 for PlayStation 3. South Park is another great entry in the genre and benefits from the years of crude jokes that have made it a staple of Comedy Central's schedule.

The game has the same voice actors as the show and begins with Cartman learning that the town is under invasion. The enemies start with cows and Underpants Gnomes, as well as others, invading Butters' house or Hell's Pass Hospital.

Every level has several waves of enemies that can be stopped only with your homemade contraptions: towers that hurl fastballs or launch cherry bombs. Like other tower defense games, you have a limited supply of money to build and upgrade towers and are faced with constantly changing them to match the weaknesses of your coming enemies.

The game stands out from what has become a crowded field because of the license. Most licensed games are pitiful at best, but South Park truly feels like the show.

Case in point: Cartman's reaction when he learns that the enemies are heading to Kenny's neighborhood.

"The mob's been going crazy on Kenny's side of town," Cartman says, referring to the trailer park ghetto where the oft-killed child lives. Normally no one would care, Cartman says, but "without the poor to do our dead-end jobs, our economy will collapse. Let's go."

It's those funny, satiric moments that couple perfectly with the addiction that is tower-defense gaming. The game includes lots of videos from the show, a plus for fans like me who have missed some episodes over the years.

I never knew what a nightmare the Ginger Kids were until level one.

I do now.

Red-headed bastards.