Bringing The Family Together, One Beheaded Zombie At A Time

Usually, Nathan is the gamer in the family. I don't have the time, energy, or skill to be a serious "gamer." But I come to you today with an actual video-game recommendation:

 Plants Vs. Zombies!!!


When Nathan & I got our new phone, we discovered our brother-in-law had kindly pre-loaded it with dozens of apps--no doubt to help us poor smartphone newbies out. Anyway, Plants Vs. Zombies was one of the apps included, and both Nathan & I became hooked quickly.

The premise is very simple: zombies are coming--LOTS of them! They're trying to invade your house and eat your brains, and the only line of defense you have are your plants, which you can strategically place throughout the yard. In all, you have about 26 different types of plants that serve a wide variety of functions: sunflowers give you "sunlight," which helps you plant more plants; peashooters shoot projectiles at the zombies; hypnotic mushrooms turn zombies against one another, "wall-nuts" force the zombies to stop and start munching, giving you more time to deal with them, etc.

There are more than 25 different types of zombies, too: dancing zombies; football-player zombies; zombies riding zombie dolphins in your backyard pool (no, really!); zombies on pogo sticks, and on and on. Now, most zombie apocalypse stories are pretty bleak and/or terrifying, and the zombies are bloody-mouthed shambling nightmares. But here...well, they're just so cute. And all your plants are pretty adorable too. It's definitely not meant to be a "scary" game...well, unless one of the zombies manages to penetrate your defenses and eat your brains. Then, it's kind of a bummer.

It's not a terribly difficult game, but the cute design and the many different routes to victory make it pretty addictive. At first, I played it exclusively on the phone, but found to my dismay that the game always crashed after a certain level. Thanks for nothing, stupid Android app! But my dejection was short-lived; Nathan found a version for our PC for only $5, so now the whole family can play!

And I do mean the whole family. Lorelai absolutely loves the game, and asks to play it after school every day. Celeste asks to play it often as well. In fact, they both love it so much that they keep inventing new usernames so they can start the adventure campaign over and over again! And Aurora, even though she can't play it herself, loves nothing better than to sit and watch her sisters/mom/dad try to thwart the zombies. She even asks us to play Plants Vs. Zombies when it's not on; she'll come up to the computer, point, and say "ZOMBEE! ZOMBEE!!" very loudly and adorably. It's so sweet that one of her first words is "zombie." We're raising a family of geeks.

So anyway, even if you don't play games often, you should check out Plants Vs. Zombies. It's easy, addictive, safe for kids, and really fun! Oh, and it comes with this nifty music video at the end that makes me giggle:

Have fun!