f13.net

Available via Steam or directly from Popcap, this is a pretty cute take on the classic tower defence games that anyone who's ever been bored at work will know of old. The basic gameplay doesn't break any new ground - zombies walk towards your house and you get to plant a variety of turrets to kill them before they make your back door and eat your brains. Over time you unlock new plants, encounter new zombie types and gain access to a bunch of puzzles and mini-games. There's also an item shop where you can buy upgrades of various types.

The game itself is fairly easy, you have to try pretty hard to fail a level in the core 'adventure' mode - at least the first time around. There's a Mario style boss fight at the end after which you go around again but with various twists applied to the levels. There are also two puzzle modes; one where you take the role of the zombies and try to get past serried ranks of vegetation, and another where you break vases to get either a random plant or a random zombie and must prevent any zombies you've just freed from reaching the house. Both of these puzzles have an 'endless' mode where you play till you lose and your score is the number of screens you cleared before failing.

Finally there are about 20 mini-games that are for the most part retreads of existing Popcap flash games such as Beghouled (it's Bejeweled with zombies) and Beghouled Twist (you get the idea). There's also a Zen Garden which appears to be a tamagotchi analogue, I haven't really figured out what it's for yet. Throughout, the game is presented with humour and style, there are a lot of terrible puns and some laugh out loud funny moments - especially in the various bits of text scattered through the game in descriptions, help files and various dropped notes.

Buy it, it's easily worth the ten bucks for the full version.

It's really fun, and I guess a kind of 'diffferent' take on TDs with such a wide range of situational towers and different kinds of zombies.

Square just came out with a game in the same vein as PvZ on the iPhone called Vanguard. Both that and this are quite fun. I think I still prefer regular old Tower defense though.

Hmm, I guess I will take a look at Vanguard Storm then. I totally adore Plants vs Zombies, and I could never warm up to Tower Defense games before that.

If you are looking for new takes on Tower Defense style games, Defense Grid: The Awakening is worth a gander.  There is a demo up on Steam that you can check out before dropping the 20 bones they want.  It's pretty much straight forward Tower Defense but done at a very professional level.

Defense Grid was recently on sale for 5 bucks on Steam and I picked it up (not sure if the price is back up or not?) - great deal for a great game if you like TD. I actually found it more enjoyable than PvZ - which is certainly charming but is just too damn easy. Though I would guess it's another of those games that's not really aimed at someone like me - my wife who only plays a game once in a while (loved Peggle) is probably more their target audience - and she is finding the game much more difficult than I did.

 :awesome_for_real:

Weak.

My friend has been ranting about this lately, maybe I should pick it up.

Aside: is Tower Defense an actual stand alone game? The first time I had heard of it was a Starcraft map; I've only ever played tower defense in SC and WC3 and always assumed they were developed there. Did they originate there, or are the SC and WC3 maps just ripoffs of some older game I've never heard of?

Tower Defense is a genre now. People say it originated with custom maps in Blizzard games, but I disagree. It originated with Rampart back in the early 90s. The custom maps just brought it back with a vengeance.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2673592/PvZ_SaveDate_v2.jpg)

ZOMBIE POST!

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/07/09/plants-vs-zombies-2-news-coming-soon/

SQUEEEEEEEEE! :drill:

Awww hell yeah.

So I logged into steam last night for the first time in a while and PvZ automatically downloaded the GOTY update.

New achievements and a custom zombie creator.

Yeah, that is all the announcement was.

I was disappoint.