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| | June 8, 2009
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig!
All good things must come to an end, and so it is with vacations… although, in this case, if I’d spent any more time in the heat and humidity of Georgia and Florida, I’d probably have expired by now! But it was fun to see my nephews, and relaxing to sit on the beach, and the less I say about my waistline after two weeks of family cooking, the better I’ll feel about it. I even got the Seattle-ite version of a tan, which is to say I’m now bright red. | |
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Just a couple of tidbits from the trip, before I get back to my usual game-related silliness. First, the whole family went out to see the new “Star Trek” movie, and it was awesome. Plenty of in-jokes and references for old fans like myself, and a fantastic reworking of the universe and storyline with modern, more sophisticated, boom-craving audiences in mind. (And, of course, Simon Pegg from “Shaun of the Dead”, which is like chocolate icing on a double-chocolate cake.) Even Ellen, my nephews’ grandma – one of the original Trekkies back in the day – was thrilled with this new version. So, two thumbs up, or more if you have more thumbs.
In other coolness, three cheers for PopCap and Delta! I forgot to charge my laptop’s backup battery before boarding the five-hour return flight from Georgia to Washington, so of course the system shut down after only a couple of hours. And I’d long since read both books I brought along. It was only at this point that I realized the little screen built into the back of the seat in front of me had a button marked “games”. One $5 swipe of my credit card, and I played Bejeweled all the way back to Seattle. Woot!
Isn’t that just like a zombie?
Just when you think the big, scary monster is finally dead, it pops up again for another fight. After the last Coffee Break, I was sure I’d said everything there was to say about Plants Vs. Zombies, but that was before I actually finished the game. As it turns out, the adventure mode is only one small portion of the whole thing, and completing it unlocks… well, practically a whole virtual shelf of different mini-games. There’s a zen garden, where you can raise plants you collect in the main game. There are survival challenges, strategic puzzles, action levels, an opposite-day version so you can play as the hungry zombies, and best of all, zombie-related spoofs of other PopCap games! In Beghouled and Beghouled Twist, you match sets of plants… while fighting off zombies. In Zombiequarium, you feed tiny brains to a fishtank full of… yep, more zombies… and collect the coins they drop. Oh, and there’s a slot machine… with zombies. And a Portal tribute… with zombies. And an invisible level, which I assume is with zombies, but of course I have no proof.
In short, not only is Plants Vs. Zombies now one of my favorite games, it’s probably the best deal on our site. I’ve been playing every day for over two weeks and I still haven’t seen absolutely everything… not bad for twenty bucks!
An unexpected pleasure
So I was looking through the latest batch of games on our site, and the title of one rather jumped out at me: Yosumin. It’s odd to see a Japanese-derived name among all the English ones (“yosumi” means “four corners”, and that’s exactly what the game is all about), so I couldn’t help but investigate. I installed the game, started it up, saw the name of the development company…
…picked my jaw up from the floor…
Okay, so it didn’t literally fall off, but that was about my level of surprise. Yosumin was made by SquareEnix, a company most hardcore videogamers consider the patron deity of Japanese role-playing games. These are the folks responsible for both the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series of games, and not incidentally for a Japanese law prohibiting videogame companies from releasing any big-series title on a school night. They do huge stuff, multi-million-copy sellers, massive “triple-A”-budget games. Seeing their name on a casual game… well, it was as if the Mariners had suddenly announced they were starting a Little League team. The way I see it, this is excellent news for casual game fans. If the big boys are playing in our backyard, it’s going to get even more exciting around here!
And unsurprisingly, Yosumin is “a hoot”, as my mum would say. It’s fast-paced, clever, and cute, and appeals to anyone who enjoys Jewel Quest, Chainz, Chuzzle, or similar puzzle games. To win each level, you must make a certain number of color matches, but not by swapping pieces or clicking blocks of identical color; for a match, you must find four objects of the same color anywhere on the board that form the corners of a rectangle. At first, it’s a lot harder than it sounds to find matches! So many of these games have trained you to look at objects close to each other instead of searching a whole board. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll start seeing rectangles everywhere.
(Literally everywhere. I can’t be the only person who sees game pieces even after they close their eyes, right?)
Next time…
It’s amazing how many new games were released in the two weeks I was gone! I’m going to have to scramble to try everything out before the next Coffee Break. It’s looking like hidden-object games are the genre of choice again with this batch, so you can count on seeing The Clockwork Man and the new Dream Day Wedding game in my next roundup.
And I’ve only just stopped squinting from my last hidden-object binge, d’oh!
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| Tech Talk
Well, I couldn’t find any new tech issues to talk about (no news is good news, right?), so I thought I’d share a couple of strategies for Plants Vs. Zombies. Some of the mini-game levels are really quite hard! The two that took me the longest to solve were Bobsled Bonanza and Last Stand.
Bobsled Bonanza
This one is nigh-impossible without the right set of plants. Not only do the zombonis and bobsleds show up with frustrating frequency, but regular zombies do rush… or shamble… in from time to time. I don’t want to spoil the fun by giving you the whole solution, but let’s just say that A) garlic and jalapenos aren’t just for salsa anymore, B) spikes can be effective in more than one way, and C) lawnmowers and pool cleaners can give you a little breathing room while you focus on one or two rows at a time.
Last Stand
5000 sun, all the time you want for planning and planting… and some of the toughest zombies in the game. I’ve seen three winning layouts for this one, including my own, and they’re all very different. But they all have one thing in common, and that’s explosions. Just make sure you have something handy to block and shoot the basic shamblers (or, better still, to slow them down… hint, hint), and enough “kablooey” power to take out the giants.
Good luck, and I’ll see you next time!
Ask Moxie!
Do you have a question or comment? I’d love to hear from you. Just email me at zmaster@microsoft.com and I’ll do my best to answer in one of these Coffee Breaks! Oh, please make sure to include your MSN Games nickname, so I know who to list here if I quote you!
(And if you have technical questions or problems with a game, we’ll cheerfully answer those as well. Just submit them through the support section of this site!)
More Moxie!
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