City 16

I’d been getting a constant stream of income, mostly from the marigolds. I’d buy a bunch of newly planted ones from Crazy Dave, grow them to full height and sell them back to him at a slightly inflated price. It was working well up until I’d decided to buy some new types of seeds. Crazy Dave doesn’t sell them cheap, so to fund them I sold him back more marigolds than usual. The seeds are useful, but on reflection I shouldn’t have bought so many. My garden’s bare and I’ve not got the funds to buy enough marigold stems to get back to my old rotation. I need to buy some food for the tree as well. There are no options left, I’ll have to fight the zombies again and hope there’s some change on their corpses.

Recently, for the first time in months, my Steam rating hit 10. This meant that I had logged over 32 hours of play time on Steam in the last 2 weeks. There were two reasons for this:

1. I didn’t realise you could save Plants vs. Zombies mid-level. This meant if I was playing it and a friend popped over I tended to leave the game on pause to go and get drunk and watch 24.
2. I played a genuine fuck-tonne of Plants vs. Zombies.

It's surprising how long I've spent in the Zen Garden given my hatred for real gardening.

Popcap are arguably the kings of casual gaming. Certainly games like Bejeweled and Bookworm Adventures exemplify the simple rulesets and short bursts of gaming that the term supposedly signifies. However, they also seem to have crossed over into the ‘hardcore’ gaming market making them one of the few casual games developers that don’t incur the derision of the traditional gaming userbase. The PC version of The Orange Box came complete with Peggle Extreme, a version of Peggle using Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 backdrops. More recently Peggle was incorporated into World of Warcraft, a combination more dangerously addictive than heroin-flavoured Haribo Stripes.

While Peggle was a game that I enjoyed, it was always in short bursts while waiting for Extreme Headshot Shooter 2: Cranial Destruction, or similar, to install. Popcap had an answer for this; they had Plants vs. Zombies. PvZ tasks you with keeping zombies away from your house. As they cross your lawn, travelling down one of 6 rows, you must take into consideration which types of zombies you are facing on a particular level and plant your defence accordingly. The game adheres to the very definition of casual: The gameplay is simple and you can finish a couple of levels in a matter of minutes. Of course you can collect a couple of bits of loot in games like Diablo in a couple of minutes, that doesn’t mean that’s where you’ll stop.

Cat-tails are a force to be reckoned with. This is clearly overkill.

In fact, the Diablo comparison is surprisingly apt. It’s a simple gameplay system wrapped up in excellent presentation, a surprising amount of tactical depth beneath the surface and, most importantly, a reward system that always keeps you looking to progress that little bit further. This isn’t a casual game, it’s the most hardcore of old-school systems made easier and more accessible. These people are dangerous. At my current point in the game everything I do unlocks something new. New plants for my Zen Garden, new mini-games and puzzle levels, new survival modes and even just more chocolate for my snail. In every round played I gather slightly more money drawing me tantalisingly closer to being able to buy a new type of plant to use in the levels or a bag of food for my Tree of Wisdom, which at certain points of its growth will inform me of a cheat code, such as the one that gives all of the zombies futuristic glasses. The most surprising thing about this point of the game? It starts after you complete the main campaign.

My favourite of the two puzzle modes. This is the 'Oh Fuck' point of the round.

The truly irresistible thing about PvZ is the level of consistency throughout. From the artstyle to the rock, paper, scissors dynamic between the different types of plants and zombies, everything is made with a clear singular vision that’s probably difficult to obtain on a larger budget release. Even something as simple as the descriptions of your plants is done with a charmingly irreverent humour:

Everybody likes and respects Torchwood. They like him for his integrity, for his steadfast friendship, for his ability to greatly maximise pea damage. But Torchwood has a secret: he can’t read.

It seems that ‘casual’ games is another in a long string of terribly inaccurate descriptions within gaming. I have no idea how much time I’ve actually put into Plants vs. Zombies, but I’d wager it was more than I have done for any AAA big-budget release in a long while. Don’t call it an addiction though; I’ve simply not seen everything that this fantastic game has to offer.