Hello everyone Helfry here and I'm back doing some more commentary articles. Now the main reason why I haven't done any articles for a few weeks is because I had to juggle between working at cvs and some other projects and thus I never got some time to do what I do best. So I won't waste anymore time so let’s jump into it.

Do you guys remember when you’re at the computer lab in school and you decided to open up Cool Math Games and played some flash games without the teacher knowing most of the time? I’ve had a few experiences playing those games back in 2016 to 2019 with games like the Papa’s Games, a few puzzle games, and most notably Bloons Tower Defense which will be the subject of this article. Now the bloons series was created by a New Zealand gaming company called Ninja Kiwi, It initially started as a series of puzzle games where you pop a set amount of bloons to advance to the next level, there were also special kinds of bloons that are able to pop more bloons and thus causing a chain reaction, those bloons being the following: The tack bloon which shoots out tacks in 8 directions when popped, the bomb bloon which explodes when popped, and the Ice Bloon which freezes adjacent bloons when popped and that was just scratching the surface there are so many more bloons in this series that I could make a separate article just for talking about how many types of bloons that are in the games. Heck some of these bloons have references to pop culture things, one bloon unleashes a lightsaber from Star Wars to pop bloons from left to right and another one summons pac-man to pop bloons for you and you have to control him using the arrow keys on your keyboard. But that’s not all ninja kiwi also made a bloons website and an editor for the community to make their own courses with some being better than others obviously. But it wasn’t until August of 2007 where they officially made Bloons Tower Defense, compared to the other games released after, there were only 5 towers, only one track, no road items, and no freeplay mode. There were also some notable glitches you can do in this game such as, pressing the tab key on your keyboard a few times will allow you to give your dart monkeys an infinite amount of pierce and range. And the tack shooter would be given an infinite attack speed boost when done, however doing this glitch will cause you to have your money count into the negatives so do be careful. Now let’s talk about the basics, it’s rather really simple to understand if you’ve played some tower defense games. Just place down a tower next to the track and they’ll automatically destroy the enemies, if one of them reaches the exit you lose a life, if you lose all of your lives it’s game over, every enemy that’s destroyed will give you cash and said cash can be used to buy upgrades for your towers. Some upgrades give your towers extra range, extra damage, extra attack speed and more. The goal is to reach a set amount of rounds to complete a track, in bloons td 1’s case you need to reach round 50 to complete the game. Now about those 5 towers I mentioned here’s all of them in detail, The Dart Monkey as the name suggests throws a single dart at the bloons, it’s pierce is not that good as it can pop a measly one bloon at a time but it can be upgraded to pop one extra bloon which is still not good and you can give it extra range too. 

The Tack Shooter shoots out 8 thumbtacks per volley, it is very useful on corners but it’s not good against thick groups of bloons, you can upgrade them for better range and a better attack speed and in the later games switch out the tacks for buzzsaw blades.

 The Ice Tower can freeze bloons within its radius, white bloons are immune to the attack and they’re a bit expensive in the first game, Can be upgraded to freeze bloons for longer, and be given a bigger freeze area. 

The Bomb Shooter serves as your area of effect tower as it can shoot out bombs that blow up in a large area, Black bloons are immune to the attacks and it’s another tower that’s quite expensive. They can be upgraded to make the bombs shoot farther and make their explosions bigger and with the next preceding upgrades in the third game the bombs can spray out a burst of fragments that can pop more bloons even the black bloons, and converts the cannon into a missile launcher which gives it a bit more range and attack speed.

And finally there’s the one and only Super Monkey which can throw darts at incredibly fast speeds, although they’re the most expensive towers in the entire game and it’s darts can only pop one bloon at a time, they can be upgraded to gain laser vision and can shoot from very far away with the next upgrade making it’s range cover nearly the entire map in later installments.

In Bloons TD 2 they have improved everything, they added two more tracks, new bloons, and some new towers. However they only added one tower unit, this tower can throw boomerangs at the bloons, even though they have a decent amount of pierce they’re not very accurate since the boomerangs have a chance to miss bloons that are right in front of them, like are they really trying to aim or not here? But at least in the later games they fixed it so that the boomerangs can always hit their targets but don’t expect them to hit them most of the time. The upgrades for the Boomerang Monkey can allow them to pop multiple bloons at a time, and can pop bloons frozen by the Ice Tower since bloons that are frozen are immune to sharp objects. They also introduce road items which really help out in the later rounds because this game will cause you to place down as many spikes as you can, and they also added the monkey glue which can slow down groups of bloons. As for the New Bloons there’s the Rainbow Bloon or as i like to call it the PRIDE Bloon, it doesn’t have any special properties but they do contain 2 blacks and two white bloons. And the other bloon added to this game is the lead bloon, these bloons have a metal outer layer that makes them immune to sharp objects thus requiring explosives to pop them, once you do pop them they’ll contain two black bloons when popped to counteract with the bomb shooters. The main reason why they added lead bloons in the first place was because people found out that you could beat the first game using only dart monkeys and nothing else and so ninja kiwi added them so that the players could at least use the other towers.

Now this segment is where i should be talking about Bloons TD 3, but this article is growing too long so it’ll have to be split into different parts so thank you for reading this article and stay tuned for part 2.