plants, zombies, and iphones
This weekend I started playing Plants vs. Zombies by PopCap Games on my iPhone. On Friday at work a number of fellow employees were encouraging me to try it out, but I work at a videogame company, so game recommendations are white noise. Until Rob spoke up (@vash18). He heard the conversation over the cubicle wall, and sent me an instant message saying, “you owe it to yourself to play Plants vs. Zombies.” That sounded like a pretty bold statement, and it was enough to yield a purchase. Why not, I had some credit lying around in my iTunes account.
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense game. My personal favorite of our games at 5TH Cell, Lock’s Quest, loosely falls into this same category. Enemies approach your base, and you set up defenses to protect against them. In PvZ, enemies = zombies, base = your house, and defenses = plants.
PopCap is a well respected studio. They’re known for having a pretty dominant position in casual games. Admittedly, I haven’t been much of a gamer in recent years, but PvZ has really caught my attention. This game really makes the iPhone shine as a platform for games. It feels as though PvZ is much more at home on iPhone than it is on the PC.
Many traditional gamers and developers haven’t taken the iPhone OS very seriously as a gaming platform. If it can’t support game genres that we’ve grown to love on other platforms, then it doesn’t quite stand up. When a new system comes out, we tend to view it through the lens of the history of videogames. What would Halo be like on this? How about GTA, or Mass Effect? But when we try to imagine our favorites on the iPhone, they just look like hamstrung versions of their console counterparts.
And it’s true. The iPhone wouldn’t support such games as we know them. It doesn’t have the power, or the input mechanisms that they’ve been built around. But just because the platform isn’t the logical step forward from the systems of yesterday, we can’t write it off. Look at the Wii. That caught us all by surprise, and you can’t deny it’s success.
Plants vs. Zombies really shows off the potential for a great gaming experience on the iPhone OS. When I try to think outside of the box of previous generations of games to what kind of experiences could exist on the iPhone, it’s very exciting to me. Now if only Blizzard would port StarCraft II.