A man cannot live by gardening alone. What? Did you think that all I do is garden? I’m a complex man, there are layers and layers to me man! Depth I say! For example, sometimes I play gardening related video games.

Plants vs Zombies is the latest PC and Mac game from PopCap games. They have made several hit games and I would wager that most people – even those with just a passing interest in games -  have played one of their titles. These games include Zuma, Bejeweled and - what might be the seminal work in Unicorn related gaming - Peggle.

From the start, Plants vs Zombies is brimming with personality. The task at hand is to defend your home from brain-starved zombies.

Surely you – being my well educated reader - have taken the standard zombie apocalypse precautions. I assume your kit contains all the standard items:

• Baseball bat w/ nail sticking out.
• Maltov Cocktails.
• Chainsaw.
• Hairspray with a lighter taped to it.
• Various sciency accessories to find a cure.
• Someone arrogant and unlikable to be eaten first.
• Trail mix.

What Plants Vs Zombies taught me is that I forgot about my most important self defense skill. Square Foot Gardening.

In the game you place plants in a grid to defend against a relentless onslaught of the undead (Just like Square Foot Gardening sorta!)

Plants vs Zombies does a great job of holding your hand in the beginning of the game. One plant at a time it increases your arsenal, but it limits you to selecting a subset of plants for the task at hand.

The game keeps the maps fresh throughout the game and slowly introduces the cast of enemies to make sure you are always on your toes. They Zombies are seriously funny, not video game funny, actually funny. When the Michael Jackson zombie appeared on my screen I actually laughed out loud. He is glorious.

The game has crisp colorful graphics when ran at it’s native (small) resolution in a window, but I do wish that when I ran the game full screen that the graphics would scale up smoothly. Instead the graphics just look pixelated.

Since I am an iPhone user and a Nintendo DS owner, I do keep thinking that this game would be a good fit for either of those systems instead of PC. But the low system requirements and the well designed automatic pausing when you click on another window convinced me that the PC version is perfectly usable.

At just $20 you will surely get more bang for your buck than almost any other game. I suggest installing it on your laptop, plop down in a nice chair in your living room and kiss the hours goodbye.

http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz