[Six]

wourme, this post (plus I guess your prior Steam recommendation blurb) finally convinced me to try the original game today.

Interesting stuff! More than any other tower defense game I've played, it feels like a bare-metal optimization puzzle. Being able to fast-forward and 'rewind' -- to jump back to the last checkpoint instantaneously -- really gives me the feeling of scrubbing back and forth on a timeline. That sense is bolstered by the fact that the system is totally deterministic, and that you don't have any input whatsoever besides building/upgrading towers.

Truth to tell, it almost seems that the logical next step for a sequel would be to make time perfectly reversible -- to make it so that you could literally scrub back and forth on a timeline and reposition your turrets temporally as well as spatially. The real-time aspect of the game strikes me as a bit vestigial; a second's difference in building a tower can sometimes mean the difference between a perfect run and an ordinary one, and yet control is so indirect and so many mechanical aspects are opaque or have limited feedback (enemies' speed, construction rate of towers, etc.) that it's almost impossible to know when you need to set something up. Maybe that sense can be acquired by the player eventually, but my guess is that the sort of perfect knife's-edge timing that leads to top scores (encouraged by the game's extensive leaderboards and rankings) occurs as much through luck as through timing.

Anyway, I guess that's my two cents from having played it for an hour or so. Maybe the game becomes totally different later on (I noticed a keybind for a nuke!) but what really appealed to me was that sense of rapid revision -- plan, test, observe, try again.