Plants Vs Zombies is awesome, if that’s all you’re going to get out of reading this then those first five words are all you need. Plants Vs Zombies is the latest release by Pop Cap the wonderful creators of Peggle. In its simplest form this is a tower defence game, zombies come at you on a number of lanes and you build plants to kill said zombies before they get past your lovely green defenders and eat your brains.The currency is sunlight which during the day will fall from the sky and is also generated by sunflowers, but at night the only source of sunlight that you have are sun-shrooms and sunflowers the former of which is cheaper but also generates less sun. You have to click on the sun that falls in order to add it to your resource pool which turns it into a bit of a click fest when you get later into the game.
A Lawn Defence At Any Hour
There is also a back yard which has a pool in which gives you access to a couple of water plants and the roof of the house which requires you to plant watermelon and cabbage catapaults. Overall there is a pretty good range of plants and zombies to plant and kill, each of them has their own particular flavour to them and for the most part there isn’t a single plant in your arsenal which is completely useless. Which is annoying because you can only carry a limited number of seeds into a given level, but it means you have to be somewhat strategic about what you bring and to help you choose you do get to see what types of zombies that you will face in a level.
The adventure mode gives you a series of single lawn battles after each other, so you start off planting a new defence every level. In addition to the adventure mode there are a bunch of mini game types which each has thier own twist on the main gameplay as well as a pair of puzzle modes which change things up quite a lot. The survial mode is the one that is most like the classic tower defence of plant a defence while wave after wave of zombies come at your line, and eventually you will be overwhelmed. My record is at 21 flags so it should be easy enough for you to beat.
The game looks and sounds beautiful, and really the only complaint I really have is that there isn’t quite enough variety in the music but it doesn’t matter too much because the music is pretty good throughout. One thing to note is that you can buy Plants Vs Zombies from Popcap directly for $20 on PC or Mac or you can buy on Steam for £6.99 so take a guess at what my recommendation is. And to close this review I leave you with this:
Broken Steel is the third piece of downloadable content that Bethesda have released for Fallout 3 and this piece attempts to address people’s complaints with the ending of Fallout 3. So saying that be wary reading the rest of this review because there may be spoilers below, and for those people that don’t read this paragraph because they are too lazy.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW!!!
Broken Steel starts off at the original ending of Fallout 3 and it gives you a couple additional choices to make of who to send into the purifier. Most people that saw the ending of Fallout 3 pretty much thought that the ending was total bullshit, and unfortunately for Broken Steel the ending is still bullshit, in some ways more so. But it does have one good side to it and that’s that the game no longer completely ends and you can continue playing, which of course makes sense as the new quest line happens two weeks later.
The main quest line is basically you working with the Brotherhood of Steel to destroy the remnants of the Enclave that are still operating in the Wasteland. So you fight alongside Liberty Prime in the first part and mostly watch for a little bit while the Enclave get totally destroyed by Prime.
"DEMOCRACY IS TRUTH! COMMUNISM IS DEATH!"
After that you end up doing a couple of tasks around the Wastes and like the other bits of DLC this is very combat focused and really there isn’t much to do other than shoot guys in the face. And to help you in this task there are a couple of cool new weapons, the only one that seemed to be anything to write home about is the Tesla Cannon, but there is a sort of flamer/mortar thing and a tri laser (which is actually way lamer than it sounds). There are a couple of new additional quests here and there but if you’ve already done the all the quests in Fallout 3 it’ll take you ages to find them.
The Blue Beam of Death
The level cap has also been raised to 30 which is pretty good and will take you a decent amount of time to get from 20 to 30. With this level cap raise comes a couple of new perks the coolest of which is a level 30 perk that causes you to explode like a nuke when you get down to 20 hp. There are a couple of new enemies but nothing hugely interesting other than bloody hell they have a lot of health.
So thats basically a run down of what Broken Steel adds but there’s actually a decent amount and at 800MS points its a pretty good deal its just really annoying that it doesn’t actually fix the ending of the game because it still sucks. But mechanically it’s filled with a bunch of new stuff thats worth getting.
Oh how I hate you. Okay technically this isn’t really a post about GFWL but more to do with the buying of microsoft points. The DLC Broken Steel for fallout 3 came out yesterday or the day before I can’t remember, but I’ve never bought anything from marketplace before so obviously I didn’t have any MS points to buy stuff with. Now point 1 why the hell can’t you just price stuff, I’m using real money to pay for this stuff just tell me how much I’m bloody spending on this stuff. Part 2 make it actully easy to buy points if you’re in the UK, I don’t have a Visa or an American Express card, I do have a Mastercard but I would much prefer to pay by debit or hey even better let me use paypal that way you don’t even need to care what country I’m in because pay pal does all that nonsense for you.
Okay slight rant over. I’ll have some impressions of Broken Steel some time today or tomorrow depending on what I’m going to be posting about it, but stay tuned.
Okay I said that I would put up another post today, I was hoping for something slightly more interesting than an ‘I failed’ post but whatever. I was hopefully going to have a video of Sins Of A Solar Empire Entrenchment up tonight but unfortunately the menus were flickering like crazy on the captured video. The rest of the game was fine but the flickering basically made the video unwatchable, but I figured that I would post how my free fraps alternative works instead.
The first link is to VH Screen Capture Driver which basically turns your desktop into a vitrual capture device, which then using some sort of video program (not really) which can read from that driver. The second link is to ProtectedSoft downloads page, the one that you want is Video DVD Maker Free. I actually hate that program but when I was playing about a while ago it was one of the only programs that I tested that worked. VLC had huge problems reading both the video and the audio, usually to the point that you may get no video at all and the audio would almost always stutter. VirtualDub read the video fine and I actually like that program, but the stuttering audio was still a problem and I couldn’t really be that bothered to cut the audio in together with the video.
The reason that I used Video DVD Maker is that it allows you to record to uncompressed avi which is something that a lot of things don’t seem to do for some reason, if you’re not that bothered by wasted CPU cycles on compression you have much better options available to you. For me at least it seems to capture both the video and audio fine. If you find something that works better let me know and I’ll test it out, but for now this is Andrew signing off.
