Pop Alert: Plants vs. Zombies
December 29, 2011, By Michael O. Varhola 0 comments
Suffice it to say, you know a game has become a cultural icon when you see characters in a television show or movie playing it. It's probably just about impossible to track how many times this has happened with classic games like Monopoly, Battleship or Operation, but then they've been around forever (or at least before most of us were born). But when I saw Plants vs. Zombies being played by a character on the HBO vampire series "True Blood" earlier this year, I knew it had arrived as well.
This game was released in mid-2009 by PopCap Games, and I started playing it a few months later when my daughter Lindsey gave it to me for my birthday, so it has certainly received—and maintained—widespread recognition in record time.
Plants vs. Zombies is an arcade-style tower-defense game, in which the player takes the part of a homeowner trying to stave off increasingly deadly attacks by undead monsters against various parts of his house and under different conditions. The homeowner never appears in the game, but if a zombie makes it into the house, a screaming sound can be heard, and the message "The Zombies Ate Your Brains!" appears.
As the name of the game implies, installing plants of various sorts is the main means of both keeping the zombies at bay and eliminating them. The game is very cartoonlike in style and does not involve any weapons, just the innate abilities of the various sorts of plants, so it is suitable for kids, as well as for older people who dislike realistic combat games. It is also a lot of fun and very addictive so, speaking from experience, if you play it once then chances are you will end up playing it a lot!
Players initially have just a few kinds of plants to choose from, but this arsenal can be expanded upon rapidly and ultimately comprise four-dozen different types of zombie-hating flora. These include ones with direct-fire attacks (e.g., Pea Shooters and their variants, including Snow Peas, Repeaters, Threepeaters and Split Peas); ones with indirect-fire attacks (e.g., Cabbage-pults, Kernel-pults, Melon-pults); ones with the ability to block zombies (e.g., Wall-nuts, Tall-nuts); ones that explode (e.g., Cherry Bombs, Doom-Shrooms); and ones that enhance or protect other plants (e.g., Torchwood sets the missiles from Peashooters on fire, while a Cob Cannon allows two Kernel-pults to be turned into a weapon of mass destruction).
There are also 11 fungoid plants intended primarily for use in nighttime scenarios (e.g., Puff-shrooms, which fire spores, and Grave Busters, which devour zombie-generating gravestones) and four aquatic plants that the homeowner can use in his pool when defending his back yard against zombies (e.g., Tangle Kelp, which grabs swimming zombies and drags them underwater, and Lily Pads, which can have non-aquatic plants installed on them).
