I Just Wanted You to See This

Remember how fun this game was the first time you played it?

Plants vs. Zombies

Wow, another zombie game. The latest (and arguably greatest) from PopCap games, masters of all things casual, is a cute, wonderfully designed tower defense game with loads of extras, and quite a bit of replay value as this sort of thing goes.

In PvZ, a variety of zombies are trying to invade your home, and your only defense other than a series of lawnmowers are the rows of plants that you place in order to prevent passage. You collect a number of "seed packets" (which are basically cards) that allow you to place a specific plant on the "lawn" which is basically just a grid. Each plant has a specific purpose, cost, and downtime before they can be planted again, and the order and manner in which they are placed will pretty much determine success or failure. The sunflower, for example, is your only means of producing sufficient "sunshine" during the day--the points you have to collect in order "buy" a plant, so they are essential to success. They must be planted early, but they cannot defend themselves, so it is up to you to also set up some defense early on, in the form of a pea-shooter, etc. so you can defend the lawn, at the cost of not being able to plant as many sunflowers right away. There are also wallnuts, which are edible barriers that block encroaching zombies and buy you some time to set things up, but they don't last forever. Every plant in the game is useful, and it allows for a broad array of strategies, as there are only so many slots for the seed packets--you have to choose carefully.



There are at least six main levels in the game, consisting of 9 or more stages in each level, with at least two or three waves of zombies to survive in each. Some have great little twists on the game play thrown in here and there. Some levels don't allow you to pick seeds at all; instead, you are randomly tossed seed packets that you must plant as the zombies invade. These levels are hectic, as you have to adapt your strategy on the fly using whatever you are given. There's also zombie bowling, in which a swarm of zombies approaches as you try to take out as many as possible by throwing wallnuts down the rows.

Stages take place during day or night, sometimes with various weather effects, and play during the night is completely different than during the day, as all of the plants are different (it's a fungal theme), and so the flow of any given level changes. New challenges are also introduced, as graves rise from the ground and take up valuable grid space, as well as spawn more zombies during the final wave of each level. Fog will obscure at least half of grid at times, so you have to choose whether or not to use up a valuable card slot in order plant something that will push it back.



The art direction in the game is awesome: endearing and funny, with a wide variety of zombie types, each with different powers (though as my wife points out, there are no female zombies, which is weird), and a few will probably make you laugh. You can access a compendium of all plant and zombie types, and the descriptions are fun to read. The music is subtle, and there isn't a whole lot of variety, but it fits the theme well, and fills it's in the background nicely. There's almost no voice acting to speak of except for the occasional moan or cry for brains from an approaching zombie. But it's all good. The sound effects for the plants are enjoyable, especially during the later stages where you'll have several rows of different shooting plants, each with a different effect. It makes the craziness of it all seem more tangible.



After beating the game you open up dozens of challenge and puzzle levels, and in a lot of ways they're more enjoyable than the adventure mode itself. There's a survival mode, in which you must evolve your defense over a five day period under certain conditions (with at least 3 waves each day) in order to win. There's "I, Zombie", in which you play the zombies themselves, and you have to choose the right zombies in the right order to get through the plant defenses and make it to the sweet brains at the end. There's also a great assortment of puzzles that have you playing anything from Bejeweled with your plants as a zombie swarm approaches, to actually having zombies with plant heads shooting down your defenses. You also open up the zen garden, where you feed and nourish plants you find during the mini games or the second play through, and they give you cash or diamonds periodically, or you can sell them back after they're grown for chunks of money. Speaking of which, I'm on the second play though now, and it's a lot of fun. You have all the plants you've collected throughout the first run ( I still haven't seen all of the plants, or even all of the zombies), but the catch is that the game will automatically select three plants that you have to take with you, and this can often make the levels more challenging than before, as they often would not have been the seeds you would have liked.

Overall, this is probably the the best $9 I've spent on a game in a long time. The art style, the humor and game play are fun, and while the game isn't very hard overall, specific levels are quite challenging, especially towards the end. The main adventure mode will take you 4 or 5 hours to complete, but with the dozens of extra games lasting at least that long, and a worthwhile second play through, it's a lot of game for the price. You can also buy it through PopCap's sight as well, but it's twice what the Steam price is, but will probably have free content for download in the future.

Zombie Shooter

Perhaps the most efficient and direct game title ever, Zombie Shooter is in fact, a zombie shooter. There is no story; you simply begin the game with one of two generic characters whose descriptions I didn't bother to read, and slaughter literally thousands of zombies, while occasionally fighting your way to power generators or dynamite caches in order to open new parts of the level. Other than that, kill everything. The floors of any given level will literally be caked with the viscera of what the game description on Steam claims is" a thousand zombies on every level, 100 on screen at once", and each zombie killed almost immediately being replaced by another one.

The graphics are actually pretty good for this sort of game, but your main character resembles a broken doll, as you move around with the W,A,S,& D keys, while rotating and aiming with the mouse. This means the torso tends to twist around unnaturally when things get crazy, which now that I think about, just adds to the overall feel of the thing. As you mow your way through this gore fest, you gather little orbs that give you experience points which you use at the end of each level to raise your characters stats, which have a noticeable effect on the game play. Raise your speed, and your character will move faster and be able to avoid the swarm a little better. raise your accuracy, and you will do more damage with each shot, etc. Zombies also drop monies, which can be used to purchase armor, ammo, health packs, and weapons upgrades.



The best part of this game, by far, is the weapons. It is immensly satisfying to kill in this game, and each weapon is equally suited for taking down dozens of enemies at a time in some cases. You start with dual wielded pistols, which is immediately cool, but quickly gain a shotgun, a grenade launcher (my favorite), a rocket launcher, a chain gun, a flame thrower, a laser rifle, a laser canon, a laser chain gun, and this thing that shoots saw blades. The pace of this game is relentless, and I literally said "holy shit!" out loud a few times as I was surrounded by scores of undead (and some other crazy stuff ), and it was only by running around like a mad chicken and using every weapon and just about every bit of ammo I had that I was able to survive. On and on it went until I played through the entire thing in three hours without stopping, And I enjoyed every minute of it.

Zombie Shooter is not the best game you will ever play. For $4.99 on Steam, you will get a 3 hour game with literally no ending, only this:


but with multiple difficulties, and a decent survival mode and a few other extras, you will get your money's worth. If you enjoy zombie games, or just want something intense and well made, even if it is a bit generic, go buy this.

Winter for the Adept

Well, that didn’t last long. After listening to The Land of the Dead a couple of months back I was incredibly excited about hearing more Doctor Who audio adventures. I discovered the Big Finish audios at just the right time, having viewed well over half of the 159 stories from the original television program that ran from 1963 to 1989. I was also thrilled that I enjoyed Peter Davison’s portrayal of the Fifth Doctor far more now than when he first took on the role back in 1981. When I looked at the stories I had to choose from I decided on one that immediately followed The Land of the Dead called Winter for the Adept. Unfortunately, it was quite a disappointment.




Every now and then in Doctor Who there appears a story that doesn’t play by the rules. Sometimes these stories are brilliant (Ghost Light, Blink) and sometimes they’re absolute rubbish (Underworld, Love & Monsters). Winter for the Adept doesn’t exactly play by the rules, either, but it in this case maybe it should have. It’s not that it has any glaring flaws, but it seems much closer to uninspiring fan fiction than the work of a serious author.

The story begins with a woman reading an old diary entry and the melodramatic way in which she does so immediately evokes the mood of Jane Austen and 19th century England. Unfortunately the story is set in Switzerland in the winter of late 1963, so we’re already off to a rocky start. At least the locale of a finishing school for young women has the air of Austen about it, if indeed that is a good thing. A couple of girls find themselves stuck in the aged academy for the Christmas holiday and decide to make a break for it…in the freezing cold.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), is all alone on a nearby mountainside…in the freezing cold. She’s left to carry the early part of the story on her own as the Doctor won’t arrive until the end of the first half-hour episode…when he explains why Nyssa ended up here in the first place. Nyssa isn’t very well written in this story and comes off sounding more like Tegan (the complainer) or Adric (the whiner) than her usual logical self. Of course, having nearly been frozen to death by the Doctor may certainly explain her behavior. A Lieutenant Sandoz discovers Nyssa and accompanies her to the academy where he’s surprised to hear the two girls have run off. He goes after them and it’s later revealed that Sandoz and one of the students, at least twenty years his junior, were planning on eloping.

And it just goes downhill from there. The story makes a surprising amount of left turns and none of them quite work. There’s a plotline about one of the characters being psychic, in the middle of the story we find out the school is haunted, and the final episode is inundated with aliens. The aliens, referred to as Spillagers (because they spill into different worlds and pillage them…get it?) would probably work better in a story that focused on them exclusively and not merely used them as bookends to a melodramatic ghost story.

I mentioned in my review of the previous Fifth Doctor audio story The Land of the Dead that I recognized none of the actors that were part of the supporting cast, but I was rather impressed with their work. In Winter for the Adept I found the opposite was true. I recognized many of the people involved, but I couldn’t say they were all that remarkable. The head of the school, Miss Tremayne, is played by Sally Faulkner who memorably appeared as the young photographer in the 1968 Second Doctor story The Invasion. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t looked it up, because Tremayne is a pretty forgettable caricature. Lt. Sandoz is played by Peter Jurasik, best known for the role of Londo Mollari in Babylon 5, but he really takes a back seat in the story and seems wasted in the part. Finally, India Fisher plays one of the school girls, but you probably know her as Charley Pollard, the Eighth Doctor’s companion in over two dozen audio stories.

Only Peter Davison remains on top of his game in Winter for the Adept, but as he’s almost entirely absent from the first episode it’s a long wait for not much of a pay off. I recommend skipping this story unless you’re a big fan of the Fifth Doctor as there are so many better audio stories available. Winter for the Adept was enough to put me off of the Peter Davison stories for a while and I decided to move on to his successor Colin Baker, but that…is another story for another time.


2 Daleks (out of 5)