Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman: Let’s Stop Those Impertinent Heroes!

Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman will bring dungeon management goodness to PSN in a few hours. In the game you protect an overlord from persistent 8-bit heroes by digging soil with a pickaxe. But, the heroes aren’t your greatest enemy. Randomness is.

Once you create a hungry Omnom, a bony bug that’s also one of your basic attackers, it may or may not wander in the direction of a hero. I like how monsters have “free will” and the chaotic demon ecosystem. It makes Badman different every time you play it, but I can understand why some players will find this element frustrating.

Use these five tips to slay the heroes and save the overlord.

1.) Build your dungeon like a typical RPG dungeon. By that I mean make lots of winding paths. The more forks, the better. In later levels you have to defend the Overlord from two or three heroes. Each branching path is a chance to split the party of heroes up.

2.) Make your dungeon narrow, no more than three soil blocks wide. Big open spaces leave too much room for you monsters to miss a hero. A Wookieman (read: giant red cyclops demon) could be standing one or two squares away from a hero and miss him completely. If you have a narrow dungeon you don’t have to worry about this. Actually, three squares is probably too wide, but in the later levels you’ll probably be force to expand existing paths to create new monsters.

Magical monsters like Liliths are much more effective in narrow dungeons too. Narrow corridors increases the chance of a hero stumbling in one of their firm on sticky webs.

3.) Don’t over dig. When you have several hundred points of dig energy it’s tempting to keep making monsters until you run low on energy. Don’t do this. First, you’re wasting dig energy that could be used to upgrade monsters. Second, if you make too many monsters you end up wasting nutrients since a strong monster like an Omnom will feast on defenseless slimes. Third, these monsters will be stronger if you wait until the end of the level after you upgrade them.

As soon as you feel you have enough monsters to beat a stage dig on the soil next to the start of the cave. This summons a hero and the extra time as a bonus.

4.) Dispatch excess monsters. Lizardmen lay eggs and spawn more lizardmen. While it’s nice to have a dungeon full of powerful brutes they also make a meal out of all your omnoms. If you bop them with your pickaxe they infuse the surrounding soil with nutrients, which can be used to…

5.) … make more Wookiemen! You need a high nutrient soil square that isn’t touching any other blocks to make one of these. So, as soon as you see a white block dig all of the surrounding blocks and then dig the white soil square. If you did this right a portal will appear. Dig it to create a Wookiemen, which beefs up the defense of all your monsters.

You could dig your Wookieman right away, but I like to save them. Wookiemen don’t appear until you hit the portal. Using the Lizardmen spawning/sacrificing technique you can make a lot of nutrient rich soil and a cluster of Wookiemen. Don’t dig them yet! Place the Overlord next to the dormant cluster of Wookiemen. If a hero happens to grab the Overlord you can surprise him by waking up your Wookiemen.

Follow these tips and you’ll unlock Holy Home Invasion Robbery, Badman! in no time.

Psst… I hid a code to download Badman for free on PSN in a few posts. The first person that finds it wins! Here’s the first third of the code: 33XA