Mention Plants vs. Zombies to someone who hasn’t played it and they’ll look at you like you’re a little crazy. Like maybe you need to up your Lithium dosage a couple milligrams.

Mention Plants vs. Zombies to someone that has played it and they’ll look up at you with a big smile. They’ll then spend the next five minutes gushing about the game and how much they enjoyed it.

I don’t know anyone who has played this game and doesn’t love it. I can think of very few games that receive that kind of universal approval. I mentioned to several people how time seemed to slip away whenever I played the game, and they just nodded and agreed with a wistful look in their eyes. (That’s right, wistful.) This is the type of game that redefines casual gaming. It is easy to pick up and play and almost impossible to put down.

The basic idea is as simple as can be. Zombies are trying to invade your house and you deploy various Plants to stop them. You harvest sun from Sunflowers or from the bits that occasionally drop from the sky that act as the game’s currency for building more plants.

Each plant has a different cost, and different strengths and weaknesses. For example, your standard Pea Shooter costs 100, but doesn’t do a lot of damage. A Repeater on the other hand costs 200, but shoots twice as fast. Sunflowers produce sun which is your resource for creating more plants. Balancing the costs and the benefits of each plant keeps you constantly on your toes. Say you fail to invest in enough Sunflowers; then you won’t have enough sun power to plant enough defensive plants to stop the undead hordes. Plant too many sunflowers and you won’t have enough firepower to stop the first wave of zombies.

Like most tower defense games, you are never in direct control. Once you plant your plants, they’ll do their thing while you watch and hope you’ve prepared properly. Towards the end of the game, you’ll see a hole in your defense that a zombie is about to exploit. Knowing there is nothing you can do until you can plant something to take him out, you’ll be frantically praying that one of your sunflowers will spew out some sun so you can erect your last second defense.

As you get further into the game, they change things up with new zombies that require new strategies. There is a large variety of different zombies – from your standard shuffling undead to the zombie with a parking cone on his head to the Michael Jackson zombie.

All of the characters ooze with personality. From the way the Sunflower plants smile as they sway, to the Old Man zombie who doesn’t really start attacking until you destroy his newspaper. You can’t help but smile as a zombie with a bucket on his head tries to penetrate your defenses to eat your brains.

The wide variety of plant types gives you the flexibility to employ whatever strategy you deem to work best. I relied on a heavy supply of repeaters and low cost blanket bombardment. I could have gone another route and erected more defensive walls or relied on one time use destructive plants.

The best part of the game is the constant feeling of reward. It feels like after every level you are unlocking a new plant, or a new game type. I was constantly playing “just one more level” in order to unlock my next item.

Plants vs. Zombies has more creativity, personality, and fun than 99.9% of the games on the market. This is easily one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played.

This review is based on the full retail download of Plants vs. Zombies provided by Popcap Games.

As I mentioned in my review of “Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal“, I am new to the whole Monkey Island franchise. Not to say I’m new to adventure games, I just somehow missed this series the first time around.

It was great to be able to catch up on a game that I’ve been wanting to play for several years. I also wanted to be able to be able to compare both the original and Special Edition, so I played through both versions. The original on PC and SE on the Xbox 360.

“The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition” takes the classic LucasArts adventure game and gives it a graphical overhaul, as well as all new voice acting. The writing still holds up to this day. It is laugh out loud funny on several occasions, and the new voice cast did a great job bringing these great characters to life.

The point and click interface works flawlessly when you are on the PC and using a mouse. Playing it on the 360 is a little trickier. You use the analog stick to move the cursor across the screen, which is pretty cumbersome. They did add the ability to use the d-pad as a shortcut to the various interactions. This is very useful since it makes it a little more functional.

"Special Edition Graphics"

The new graphics are a mixed bag. The backgounds are beautiful. They look like paintings, and I really enjoyed their style. However, I was not too fond of the redesigned characters. They have a very similar hard angled / carved out of wood look like the new Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoons.

The text is also pretty hard to read sometimes. In the original, all the text appears below the action. In the remake, all the text choices appear in white. This makes them incredibly hard to read in a few scenes.

I also have a little bit of an issue with the animation. With the original graphics, everything moves as you would expect. However, when you apply those same animations with the same number of frames to the new graphics, it makes it look wonky. I know in this type of remake they almost always do a one to one with the animation (see the HD remake of  Street Fighter II: Turbo), but it looks wrong with high res graphics.

"Original Graphics"

One of the coolest features is the ability to switch between the original and new graphics simply by hitting the back button. Sometimes, I ended up doing this to read the text when it was one of those hard to read scenes I mentioned above. It also allows you, if you are so inclined, to play through the game both ways. Pretty convenient considering there are two endings.

All in all, “The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition” is a great adventure game by any standard. I would recommend it to those who loved the original or if you are new to the franchise. It is even a good jumping on point if you are new to the genre.

I just hope that this leads to more Special Editions and re-releases of these great classics.