If I could only say one thing in this review, it’s this: Go get Plants vs. Zombies now. The only people exempt from this rule are those who don’t like look of the zombies. Plants vs. Zombies oozes innovation in all parts of the game including game play, game modes, humor, length and rockin’ music. The game gives you a big spudow (exploding potato) for your buck and then some. Furthermore, Popcap Games may have blown away the massively popular Bejeweled 2 and Chuzzle with this one.

You have various plants at your disposal with different super powers to help you prevent the zombies from reaching your house and eating your brains. The thought of zombies sounds creepy, but they don’t scare my six-year-old who instead giggles at their funky movements and traits. You might even think they’re cute and funny.

Like people and animals, the zombies have different personalities. One is a football player and harder to attack, another wears a traffic cone on his head (maybe he was a construction worker in a past life) and another loves his newspaper and gobbles things faster. Their characteristics give you an idea of how hard it will be to fight them. Watch out for the singer zombie that brings an entourage with him!

Once you meet a certain zombie for the first time, it goes into your almanac. The suburban almanac describes defines every zombie and plant along with its strengths. If you haven’t encountered a plant or zombie, it won’t give you a heads up. So be prepared for whatever comes your way.

So much happens in this game — all of it a blast (literally, too). For one, it has five games:

• Adventure: Five rounds with 10 each taking place on the front lawn, night time, the backyard with the pool and on the roof. You have a select number of plants to pick and they each come with a price. But you don’t buy them until you plant them.
• Mini-games: 20 unique games where several are a more advanced mode of an earlier mini-game.
• Puzzle: Two games. One contains nothing but cases. Inside the vases are plants or zombies. You put the plants wherever you think it’s best to help defend against the zombies. The other game gives the zombies a chance to practice attacking the lawn with cardboard cutouts of the plants, so no plants are harmed. You want the zombies to make it across to eat the fake brain at the end of the lawn.
• Survival: Playing different scenarios five times and changing up the plants between each level.
• Zen garden: Manage a garden of plants beginning with two plants. Give them water and plant food. This no pressure game only calls for feeding the plants when they need it.

You can shop for special plants and tools at Crazy Dave’s shop. He’s craazzzzyyyy and lets you get away with good deals. In his shop, you can buy another slot so you can add more plants into your arsenal for the next zombie battle.

Daytime battles require different weapons than nighttime battles. The sunflowers don’t produce as much sun, so you can rely on mushrooms. However, they only produce a little sun and produce more as they grow. Mushrooms can work in the daytime, but they’re asleep and need help to wake them. So it’s obvious you have all kinds of strategies to play with in this little treat.

Many games come with multiple modes. I tend to only like the main one. I took pleasure in almost every game as much as the main one — a rarity. The music will have you gettin’ down while you wear down those zombies. When you finish the main game, sit back and enjoy the surprise and hilarious ending.

Plants vs. Zombies is ripe for more brain eating sequels. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been working on this review to get it right, but it doesn’t turn out the way I want it to. Nonetheless, Plants vs. Zombies provides hours of a good time.

Download Plants vs. Zombies for PC or for Mac

I love PopCap Games
Chuzzle
and Peggle.
. When you arrive on the home page, click “New Deals Everyday, Click Here” to see all the Winter Funderland deals.

Today’s deal is the first FREE “level pack” for Peggle Nights. Available exclusively at Popcap.com, the Peggle Nights “Holiday 2008″ level pack features five all-new levels, with holiday themes or themes related to other PopCap titles – or in some cases, both. The new levels can be played in the Quick Play or Duel modes of Peggle Nights, and there are also ten new challenges in Challenge Mode based on the new levels. Additional level packs will be forthcoming in 2009 and beyond.

From Popcap release (shortened): Steve Day was a man on a mission – now he’s the proud possessor of the world’s highest-scoring Peggle shot. A currency trader from Portsmouth on England’s southern coast who previously spent a dozen years as a software developer, Steve achieved his 18-million+ point shot after being inspired by a video of the previous best shot, a 13-million point shot by Max Daube of Australia, using the same level and power-up. Steve’s YouTube video of his shot, along with a shot-by-shot “video tutorial” of the entire level on which the shot occurred.

After buying Peggle Deluxe and completing most of the game, Steve did a Google search looking for tips on scoring 750,000 points on one level – generally considered the toughest of the game’s 75 “Challenge Mode” hurdles. “If I hadn’t found the YouTube replay of Max’s wondrous shot, I don’t think I’d have ever thought of it myself,” Steve admits. “I’d already managed to clear all of the pegs on that level (“Beyond Reason,” the last level in the game, known less formally as “Zen Frog”) using the “space blast” power-up, but thanks to the videos on You Tube I finally achieved the 750K challenge. However, having completed the game I felt somehow robbed of what had become my working companion, and having read some of the comments on You Tube regarding the ‘impossibility’ of clearing the side pegs, I decided to see if I could find a way, and perhaps set a new scoring record in the process.”

“First, I set about finding a way to clear all the pegs – orange and blue – from the sides of the level without creating holes in the central ‘DNA strands’ of pegs due to ricochets,” he recalls. “As it turned out I achieved this in only an hour or so. I employed the same technique I’d used obtaining the ‘100% clear’ on some of the harder levels, namely picking logical landmarks on the screen to use as mouse position markers. In this way I could easily replicate the shots, and when combined with a little ‘bucket timing’ could be guaranteed of getting a free ball to boot. Clearing the hole at the bottom of the helix proved more difficult though, since it was a moving target; and it took awhile longer to work out some shots that had at least a 70% chance of getting a free ball.”

Steve continues, “By this time I was regularly getting 5 million point finishes, and completing probably 1 in 5 attempts, and I had decided I wanted to beat the 13.5 million by a decent margin, and make a video to put on YouTube. It had also become apparent that the highest scores were dependent on having a large number of blue pegs left to clear after the last orange peg had been hit. So having got 14 Million a couple of times, the extremely lucky 18 Million point shot came about through a combination of the law of averages and 3 ‘lottery winner’ type lucky shots, each being the result of miss-timed shots that ended up kicking the bucket, taking out an extra peg or two, and miraculously ending up back in the bucket where I had originally intended them to go. It was these extra pegs, and a lucky final shot, that secured the very pleasing Cool Clear and Ultra Extreme Fever – though I don’t think that this added greatly to the final score. Of course getting an extra ball off of Reinfeld was just the icing on the cake and did add 300K to the score board which was a nice touch.”

As for the painstakingly shot and edited “how-to” video that follows the footage of the shot itself in Steve’s YouTube video, “I wanted to make a ‘live play’ tutorial section to show that it was indeed possible to clear the side pegs without touching the inner helix,” Steve explains. Indeed, Steve’s exhaustive video tutorial provides details on each and every shot of his record-breaking effort, including exactly where to position the cursor prior to launching each shot AND location and direction of the bucket below the playfield when each shot is launched.

When asked whether he believes his record will stand the test of time, Steve is realistic to say the least. “I’m under no illusion that my score is somehow ‘unbeatable’ – and in fact would love to see someone top it,” he grins. “That was the intention behind the tutorial in the video, to see if collectively the Peggle Deluxe community could compile enough information to achieve and even better shot and score. However there must be an absolute theoretical ceiling on the maximum score possible. Hopefully someday we’ll get to see what it is!”

Peggle review.

I don’t need a study to tell me that playing casual games helps relieve stress and improve my mood. When the writing muse stays away or my spirits drop, I play a game I need to review. Almost every time (don’t like to use 100%), I feel better after a few rounds of a casual game.

See the results of the study and the Popcap Games press release.

Well, I had my 10 best casual PC games of 2007 all ready to go… then Ken Edwards from Blogcritics.org’s gaming section asks me if Peggle Deluxe is on the list. When I told him I hadn’t played it (I’d never get work done if I play and review every released game), he told me to check it out before posting the top 10.

Oi! Within minutes, I know this game deserves a spot in the top 10. But what unlucky game am I going to knock off the top 10 list?

Before digging into the world of Peggle Deluxe, let me tell you a story. My parents had a classic Pachinko machine with a door handle. It only worked some of the time, but I loved the noise when you hit a jackpot. Years later, Paul and I went to Atlantic City for the weekend and saw modern Pachinko machines with the round handles for sale.

So the first thing that I thought about when playing Peggle Deluxe was that it was a twist on the Pachinko. Sure enough, I found an article about PopCap’s creation of Peggle. Yes, it’s PopCap’s fault that many of us are addicted to several games… Bejeweled (originally Diamond Mine), Chuzzle, and now Peggle.

In Peggle Deluxe, shoot a ball anywhere and let it do the work. The goal is to clear all the orange pegs. After letting go of the ball, sit back and hope it hits lots of orange pegs along with a green peg for a power up and a purple peg for bonus points. Once it makes it through the jungle of pegs, hope that it lands inside the moving bucket that you can’t control. It simply moves side to side. It’s nice not having pressure to control the bucket on top of everything.

The game begins with a unicorn as your guide. Every guide has its own special powers that you earn when hitting a green peg. The unicorn reveals a guide so you can see where your ball goes next after it hits the first peg. I won’t mention the others as finding out their powers is part of the fun. Each character has its own theme that changes the pegs and background to match that theme.

The pegs often line up to look like an object or create a challenging shape. One level had three infinitys, another shows one of many animals, and still another has moving circles. Lots of variety! Impossible to get bored and almost impossible to tear yourself away.

The game compels you to cheer and whoop when you hit that last orange peg thanks to its cool close up slow motion effect. The view zooms in to the last orange peg, which slows down like a dramatic moment in a movie. Now, sometimes you might miss, but when you hit it — Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” plays with booming enthusiasm like a running back scoring a touchdown.

Would you believe that one of the best features — “Ode to Joy” — was originally a placeholder? That’s what the previously mentioned article says.

Occasionally, you’ll be amazed by a move. Watch it again with the “Instant Replay,” that does exactly that… replays the last move. After you play through the quest and conquer all the games with all of the characters, you unlock more game modes including Quick Play for playing a previously played puzzle using any character you want, Duel (to play against someone or the computer), and Challenge that contains 75 puzzles.

Each level comes with a specific amount of balls. The fewer balls you use to clear the orange pegs, the higher the bonus. You can also earn free balls by scoring a specified amount of points or dropping the ball into the bucket.

Just try it — play Peggle Deluxe for at least 15 minutes and you’ll love it.

System Requirements

• Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98
• 256 MB RAM
• 700 MHz or faster processor
• DirectX 7.0 or later