Warcraft : Tower Defense, Nintendo DS Homebrew-ed Adaptation

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I never really have written a review of Tower Defense, a homebrew adaptation of the popular Warcraft III mod, for the Nintendo DS, despite it being one of my favourite homebrew games. I intend to make up for that and so here goes.

For those who are not familiar with the Warcraft III version of Tower Defense, it's basically involves stopping waves of creatures (creeps) moving from Point A to Point B of an obstacle/maze-like map. Stopping creeps involves building and upgrading towers that will slow them down, deal damage and act as buffs for other towers.

The Nintendo DS version of Tower Defense is somewhat similar to the PC counterpart whereby it has this Warcraft 3 theme going on. Players start by selecting a map and the actual game begins with all the action taking place on the bottom screen. The top screen is used to show build options, wave stats, the amount of gold earned, and not forgetting tower stats.

In order to access the build options, players will need to "switch screens" by pressing either trigger button. This will cause the top screen to swap with the bottom screen and players will be able to access the build options (and everything else) using the stylus.

Gold is awarded by killing creeps and is required for building and upgrading towers. Since players can only place a certain number of towers, positioning, upgrading and selling of towers is a necessary form of micro-management, a term Warcraft III was rather well known for.

Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS manages to port over the strategic depth and fun gameplay of its more illustrious PC counterpart and while the PC version emphasizes on multiplayer teamwork, the DS version is pretty much a single player game for now. Graphics wise, it's pretty, in a DS way and you gotta love the sound effects :)

You can get this excellent homebrew game at the developer's website over at http://ndswtd.wordpress.com. If you have a slightly older version of the game and you cannot get it to run on your R4, it probably needs patching; please refer to my patching guide over here.

Running Homebrew on a Nintendo DS and a R4

You just bought a R4 Revolution for the Nintendo DS and you look forward to running homebrew applications such as DSOrganize and homebrew games such as DSDoom and Tower Defense. However you find that you are unable to run the homebrew applications after copying them into the MicroSD card of the R4.

A common solution for this is to patch the particular application's .nds file (otherwise known as the ROM file) with a DLDI patch. Don't ask me what it does but I guess it fixes something to do with the file system.

Anyways, here are the steps to patching the file:

1. Download the DLDI patch for the R4 here
2. Download the DLDI patching software here
3. Assuming that you have the ROM file in hand, unzip the DLDI patching software to somewhere that is conveniently accessible from the Command prompt.
   
4. Place the DLDI patch and the ROM file in the same location as well.
   
5. Using the command prompt, head over to the folder containing the files mentioned above.
6. Key in the following at the command prompt: dlditool r4tf.dldi filename.nds, with filename being the name of the ROM file
7. Press the enter key to begin the patching process
8. Copy the ROM file over to the MicroSD card and you should be able to run the application/game.