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In all honesty, I’m about to start raving happily on like a 12-year-old girl with Hannah Montana tickets, and yes, it’s all because of zombies. For months now, ever since I saw the best casual videogame ad ever on YouTube, I’ve been just dying to play Plants Vs. Zombies. So when I did one last check of our site to see what might be new that I could play on the flight, and saw those three magical words, I knew it was about to be a very good vacation indeed.
Gardening in Zombie-Infested Urban Landscapes
Admittedly, I have a great fondness for flowers and gardening. You could probably guess from my annual descriptions of spring in Seattle… or from my periodic plugging of Plantasia… or, I suppose, from the fact that I frequently say how much I love flowers. Hmmm. I may be obsessed. But that’s beside the point. I am also a big fan of deliberate silliness, and that’s where Plants Vs. Zombies was bound to shine.
Remember Desktop Tower Defense? Good game, solid and entertaining. The idea was to place defensive weaponry to stop invaders from advancing across your screen. A couple of years ago, another developer got the idea to replace the desktop with a suburban yard and the towers with plants and garden gnomes, and voila, Garden Defense was even more enjoyable! I can only imagine that somebody at PopCap must have been looking at one of those games, probably at 3 in the morning after a late-night TV creature feature, and said to himself, “you know what this game needs? More zombies.”
And so here we are. You are a homeowner with a small but well-turfed yard, lots of sunshine, and a great view of your street… which just so happens to be full of hungry zombies. They plan to amble across your yard, enter the house, and eat your brains. Luckily, your seed packets from the Bloom & Doom Flower Company contain everything you need to stop the undead invasion. Some plants spit projectile peas, some act as walls, some actually explode... and whoever thought these up is a mad genius. My favorite so far is the potato bomb, a garden mine that explodes with a “SPUDOW!” when stepped upon.
PopCap being PopCap, though, they didn’t settle for imitating another game. This is more a reinvention of the Desktop Defense genre, with set paths, limited placement points, and a ton of strategic possibilities. It is, at the same time, simpler and more complex than its predecessors; awesome and oxymoronic as that might sound. And everywhere, the silliness abounds. Zombies holding screen doors or wearing buckets on their heads. Pool zombies with ducky inner tubes and snorkels. One poor zombie in his boxers, just trying to finish the Sudoku puzzle in the paper… and then eat your brains. Green plants for daytime battle, well-armed mushrooms for those midnight onslaughts. And the minigames! Bowling for zombies. Whack-A-Zombie. Think-fast gardening.
I could actually go on for another hour just about how much fun I’m having with this game, but A) your eyes would likely cross from boredom, and B) it cuts into the time I could be spending playing it. Also, C) I’d rather see you downloading and trying the game than reading more about it. It’s even better than I’d hoped, and I want to share it with everyone!
A Potent Brew
Before I found myself battling hordes of the undead with violent vegetation, I sampled a game of a very different sort, and found it quite tasty indeed. Mystic Emporium is a time-management game much like Turbo Pizza and its siblings, but based in a magic shop that sells powerful potions, sorcerous seeds, and arcane artifacts. The gameplay is fairly standard for this genre: you take customers’ orders, select ingredients to brew potions or grow seeds, deliver the orders and collect your payment. Money can be used to upgrade various features of the shop, or to speed up your own movement.
Where this game differs, really, is in the “cute factor”. Seriously, I actually caught myself saying “awww” a couple of times, embarrassing as that is to admit. Your character is a little witch with a black cat on her head, and her customers range from the stereotypical star-spangled wizard to wicked witches, medusas, forest spirits and even the most adorable little vampires you’ll ever see… it’s like watching the neighborhood kids stop by in their supposedly scary Halloween costumes and trying to keep a straight face.
If you’re a fan of the time-management games, this one is definitely worth a look, if for no other reason than it does away with the traditional “chaining” bonuses. It’s rather refreshing to score Expert on a level without carefully planning how to do the same thing four times in a row on every single action.
And yes, because it’s cute.
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