Cute.

I'm too sick right now to post a real blog entry, but I figured that I can start posting little videos and mini-posts about the tinier things that I like, because otherwise I will take over the facebook wall of the only person that I talk to who likes games.

So apparently there is this sub-genre of real time strategy games called tower defense games. I've been hearing a lot about these games recently. They're more friendly to casual players than full-blown strategy games, and it would seem that people are really excited about making about a hundred of them for the iPhone.

In a tower defense game, instead of micromanaging an army that you send against another army, you micromanage the defensive operations of a base and keep the other army from overwhelming you.

I'm not sure how much I like the idea of tower defense games, though when I played real time strategy games (badly) I did enjoy base building more than the messiness of war. Nowadays, I tend to like games that concentrate more on simple fun and less on complex strategy or complicated micromanagement. If I were to play a real time strategy game now I don't think I would like the highly competitive, skilled play involved in things like Starcraft. If I were to play an RTS, which I haven't really done in years, it would be something with more of a focus on hilarious live action cut scenes...

...or a "meta-time" strategy game.

Now that I'm finally getting to the point of this post, I'd like to mention that I really dislike the way internet/hipster/young person culture treats the idea of zombies. It truely bums me out when people think that they can pull off zombie-based humor. So, there's this company called PopCap Games who do an awfully good job of making addictive casual flash games and things like that. They've created a game that, despite feeding off of this zombie fad, I can't help but find charming. Plants vs Zombies is a tower defense game in which you use flowers and other things that grow to defend against a zombie horde. It isn't out yet, and I haven't watched actual gameplay footage, but I can't help but think this thing looks as fun and charming as the dickins:


The key concepts that make me like this, I think, are "sunflower" and "screen door shield." Yep, Cold War alternate realities and throwing watermelons at zombies. Whimsical stuff is fun.