I really love Square-Enix.  I really do.  I tell you, they can take what should be the worst crap imaginable and make it fun, engaging, and really, really pretty.  Take, for example, the concept of desktop tower defense games.  A dime a dozen, right? Exactly.  But let Square-Enix put one on, as they did with their game Crystal Defenders now on Xbox Live Arcade for eight hundred Microsoft points, and it turns out to be a fun experience that looks really, really good.

The plot is pretty much as advertised–you defend crystals from being captured by various monsters, and you’ll do so by stationing various Final Fantasy figures like soldiers, black mages, monks and archers along paths leading to your crystal storehouse.  Then, a series of monsters will walk those paths, and you’ve got to lay enough firepower out to make sure that the monsters can’t reach your crystal storehouse.

I know, you’ve already played this kind of game several times before, and sometimes you’ve even played it at work when you were supposed to be doing something else, but I definitely don’t remember ever being able to play it on my Xbox 360.  So for the shockingly cheap price of eight hundred Microsoft points, you too can have an extremely pretty good time with a game you’ve played before, but never with one that’s looked this good.

Another round of joy comes to us from the good folks at Armor Games, and this time it’s called Crop Circles.

At first glance, Crop Circles is another fifty-wave tower defense game.  And the first glance will prove surprisingly correct on this run.  The key difference to this one, not always found in a tower defense game, is that you’ll get to establish the path the aliens that are invading your farm have to take.  From there, it’s a fairly simple matter to lay down ordnance in suppressing, interlocking fields of fire sufficient to wipe out the alien horde and keep it out of your barn, because who KNOWS what those filthy alien scum will do to your livestock.

Casual gaming in the extreme, if you’re a fan of tower defense games then you’ll definitely like this newest edition.  But if you’re not into tower defense, even vaguely, then Crop Circles will prove worse than an M. Night Shyamalan movie about them.