Not the usual game I would review but I was obsessed over it all weekend.  Plants vs Zombies is a tower defense game from PopCap Games and is also available on Steam.  The story is that you are trying to protect your home from the neighborhood Zombies.  I personally would think that your Realtor should mention zombie infestations but maybe that isn’t common enough.

Every level gives you either new zombies to battle, new plants to work with, a mini-game type level, or a combination of these.  The plants are not as diverse as they might seem.  This is mainly because you are going to find ones that work and just stick with them.  You might upgrade to other plants that do the same thing but that’s about it for change.

Zombies on the other hand are diverse an quickly become dangerous.  You start out battling the easy standard ones and quickly move up to American football player zombies and ones on Zamboni.  Throughout every levels there are slow times where yes a few zombies come out, such as early in the level as you build your defense, and then escalates to denser waves.

The level design while simplistic is very detailed in recreating a font yard, backyard with pool, and a terracotta rooftop.  All the levels are made up of five rows that zombies move along.  The good news is that at the end of each row is something to mow down the zombies if they manage to reach the edge.  The flip side to this is that the device to mow them down does not regenerate during a level.

Now in the past with the Final Fantasy Crystal Defenders games I have played a lot of tower defender style games, however this one is hands down the cutest and most addicting.  The only point of improvement might be in the exponential difficulty, especially with the mini-games.

Okay so far that is nothing more than bookmarks.  I totally understand that as a first thought, but that’s where it improves by leaps and bounds.  Not only does it allow for you to go back and read articles offline but you can also take it down to just text.  The text only version is much cleaner and you don’t need to worry about ads and what not.

The only negative here is, that the app isn’t one of a kind.  If you want to try another one Instapaper does the same things for the most part.  I still suggest Read It Later.  Maybe try it in conjunction with Echofon on the iPhone.  Both are great apps that you can try lite version for free.  (Try – Echofon lite & Read It Later lite)

I prefer the term “treasure hunting”! ~ Locke Cole

Anyway while an amazingly simple premise the game is super addictive.  The Wii version is played with the Wii remote set on it’s side as a regular controller.  For the most part this makes control pretty simple.  This leads to my one complaint on the iPod, which is that the dragging the units with the finger is not always as accurate as it could be.  Now no need to tell me that you can use the directions pad by changing the control screen.  Only problem I have with this is the screen becomes tiny and hard to see.

Graphically the iPod oddly looks significantly better.  Not sure what that is about but either one looks very simplistic in the long run.  Often times making harder enemies just recoloured weaker enemies.  In fact in one case one strong enemy is just a giant version of one of the weakest enemies.  The backgrounds however are greatly diverse and pretty impressive for being a giant grid.  Again in the case of this game don’t expect super graphics for the entertainment.

Overall if you have the choice between the two definitely go with the WiiWare version.  I only say this because there are more levels to play and I feel like a greater sense of accomplishment since you can’t just skip through any level.  Currently there is only an R1 and R2 for Wii and the iPod has W1, W2, and W3, so you may want to keep that in mind.  On that same line be for warned the WiiWare ones are sold separately while the iPod has the benefit of being sold as a group.