Not the review, the car. According to Clarkson. As always, reading one of his reviews is infinitely more entertaining than having somebody tell you about it, so go here and enjoy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article7105825.ece

If you listen to our podcast (which you should), hearing that I’m a PopCap fan isn’t much of a surprise. I really dig the way they put so much more into their games than you expect. Sometimes it’s little things, sometimes it’s big things. Sometimes it’s stuff that’s just entirely unexpected. And sometimes, in the case of Plants vs. Zombies, the new (vaguely) tower defense-style game from PopCap, it’s lots of things. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing the review Beta of PvZ and in a word, I think it’s fantastic. Hit the clicky thingie to read why…

Let’s start with the premise, which also happens to be the title: Plants vs. Zombies. There’s no shortage of zombie survival stuff in the world of gaming, but how many times have you defended yourself from the zombie horde with plants?!

When you first get into the game, you start out only with access to Adventure mode. This takes you through five stages of increasingly-challenging levels, each of which yields a new plant that you have access to, or some kind of upgrade or access to another part of PvZ. The five stages are your Front Yard, Front Yard at Night, Back Yard (with a pool!), Back Yard at Night (with fog!) and your Roof. Through all five stages, there’s one constant:

THE ZOMBIES WANT TO EAT YOUR BRAINS!

In fact, keeping them from eating your brain is your primary concern. To do this, you plant a combination of resource-producing, offensive and defensive plants on the playfield. Plants produce resources in the form of sunshine. During the day, there’s also sunshine that occurs naturally, from that big, burning ball in the sky, aka, the sun. You gather sun, which gives you sun points. You spend your sun points on new plants. Sunflowers are an obvious early choice since they give you more sun and, hence, the ability to buy more plants. Early on, you only have access to plants like the Pea Shooter, which shoots peas at zombies to knock off an arm, then a head, then take ‘em down once and for all. And so PvZ begins, with a couple of simple, yet important plants. Plants that will keep the zombies from…say it with me…EATING YOUR BRAINS!

Keep in mind that aside from a sun point cost, plants also have a recharge rate. Some recharge slowly and others more quickly. Learning these recharge rates as you plant your plants will help form your strategy on each new level.

Now that you’ve got the gist of it, get ready for some challenging fun, because as I mentioned, every time you finish a level, you gain access to something new. Usually, this is a new plant that gets added to your arsenal. But keep in mind that even if you have 20 plants from which to choose (eventually you’ll have many more than 20), you only have a limited number of seed packet slots to fill on any given level. You start out with just 6, so you need to make the most of it. As each level begins, you’ll see a quick pan over to the side of your yard to see what type of zombies will be attacking you during the level. Each time you get a new plant or encounter a new zombie type, info about each shows up in the Almanac, which you can reference at any time to help you decide on a strategy. So seeing the types of zombies that you’ll have to face on a level is helpful in using all of that info to pick the best plants for that level.

But don’t be fooled early on in the game…while PvZ is pretty easy at first, it quickly gets challenging, forcing you to carefully decide on a balance between resource production, offense and defense. Sometimes the strategy you have in mind simply won’t work on that level and you’ll have to try again. And even when you finish all 50 levels of the Adventure, there’s PLENTY more where that came from!

At some point in PvZ, you start collecting coins and gems, which go into a pool of money that you can use to buy upgrades for your plants and other defenses, as well as things for your Zen Garden. Your Zen Garden is activated later in the game, and is a place where you grow and nurture various plants that produce more money for your bank account. With more money, you can buy more seed slots, upgrades and other niceties for use throughout PvZ.

There are also mini-games that you can play, all within the context of the PvZ theme and artwork. Some of these will be instantly recognizable to PopCap fans, such as Beghouled and Beghouled Twist (heh) and Zombiequarium. Others are original to PvZ but no less entertaining. Some of the ones I had a particularly tough or fun time with are ZomBotany (you battle Zombies with the heads replaced with the same type of plants you can use against them…these are tough mini-games!), Column Like You See ‘Em (where you plant an entire column of plants at a time), Last Stand (where you start out with 5000 sun points and pick your plants…and get no more sun for the entire level!) and one of my personal nightmares, Bobseld Bonanza…I still haven’t beaten this level…ugh!

Then there are the Puzzle games, which fall into two categories: Vasebreaker and I, Zombie. In Vasebreaker puzzle levels, you smash open vases that have either plants or zombies in them. Plant the plants you find to keep the zombies you find at bay. A very fun and clever twist on the game. I, Zombie pits you as the zombies against the plants over 10 levels, each with its own theme and challenge. These were a lot of fun as well. The last Vasebreaker and I, Zombie level are “endless” levels where you just keep going and going, collecting a flag at the end of each round and seeing how many flags you can get.

Then, there’s Survival mode, where you build up your playfield of plants over the course of five rounds per level. In other words, you start out a Survival mode level just like you would a normal Adventure mode level: By picking your seeds for the plants you want to use. But at the end of the round, rather than going to the next round, you continue the level by picking new plants…but the plants you already have stay planted. It’s actually a lot of fun and quite hair-raising at times. Once you finish the day, night, pool, fog and roof levels of Survival mode, you move onto the hard versions of each of those. I shouldn’t have to say this, but they’re REALLY HARD. So much so that after a while you might be frustrated enough to EAT YOUR OWN BRAINS!

And if you make it past all 10 “normal” levels of Survival mode, Survival mode Endless awaits you, where you just keep going and going and going, collecting a flag after each round.

So what about the stars of the game…the plants and zombies? Well, there are lots of them. I don’t want to give away too much, because it’ll spoil the fun of discovering and gaining access to them all during the course of playing PvZ, but let me take this opportunity to segue into talking about some of the reasons why PopCap are so successful. As in many of their games, there’s a lot in the way of fun details that make the game even better than the gameplay alone makes it. For instance, the art and animation style in PvZ is so much fun. The plants dance, sway, bob, blink, grunt and more as they work for you against the zombies. One of my favorites, the Squash, is a grumpy-looking gourd who sits where you plant him, bobbing up and down with a permanent scowl, waiting for a zombie or two to get close. When they do, Squash looks  over at them, grunts a “Huh?!” and jumps up and over onto them, squashing any zombie (well, almost any zombie) unlucky enough to be underneath at that moment.

The zombies, too, are fun and often clever, each serving a distinct purpose. Sometimes even with a porpoise (you’ll find out). Again, I don’t want to spoil too much of the fun and discovery, but here’s the text from the Alamanc entry for the Snorkel Zombie, as an example:

Snorkel Zombie
Snorkel Zombie can swin underwater
Toughness: low
Special: submerges to avoid attacks
Only appears in the pool
Zombies don’t breathe. They don’t need air. So why does Snorkel Zombie need a snorkel to swim underwater? Answer: Peer pressure.

It’s fun, goofy stuff like that that, in part, makes Plants vs. Zombies so much fun to play and just to take in. And it’s not just the fun, whimsical, animated graphics, either. The music and sound effects are also great, providing the same kind of cartoon-creepy tone you might experience in the best Scooby-Doo episodes (but without the ’70s-specific vibe). You’ll probably smile (and get a bit tense) every time the little sound effect plays to let you know that “the zombies…are coming!” (yes, you’ll hear that spoken by the zombies as well) or every time you hear a zombie say “Brains!”. And you’ll dread other sound effects, like the sound of water splashing behind the fog in your pool at night, when you didn’t just plant something there. Uh oh.

This game is a blast to play, look at, listen to and laugh with. If I have any gripe about the game, it’s that the cursors used are the standard system cursors (or what look an awful lot like them). I’d prefer a bigger-scale cursor (a gloved hand with a green thumb?) not only to match the whimsy of the rest of the graphics, but because those tiny pointer and hand cursors easily get lost among the mayhem you’ll unleash in PvZ. Not that I want the game to be less challenging, but I want it to be challenging because of what’s going on in the game, and not because I can’t find my cursor. But this is a very small nit to pick with an otherwise superb effort.

In the end, it’s not any one thing, but a whole bunch of things that make Plants vs. Zombies so much fun and so awesome: A simple but challenging concept, fun visuals, great soundtrack, fantastic variety in gameplay (especially for a casual game) and a healthy (or, not so healthy, if you happen to be a zombie) dose of humor. You will spend many hours playing PvZ and over those many hours, you’ll discover new ways to keep the zombies from EATING YOUR BRAINS! And if you haven’t done so already, you’ll see exactly why PopCap has such a stellar reputation for doing what they do.

Tomb Raider Underworld once again casts the player in the role of the world’s most well-endowed treasure hunter, Lara Croft. And when I say “well-endowed” I am, of course, referring to Lara’s massive knowledge of ancient civilizations, relics and the mythology and occult that go along with them. Hit the clicky thingie for the full review…

In this outing, Lara will be reunited with some familiar faces, including Winston, Zip, Alister, Amanda, Natla aaaaand…Lara. Huh? Well, you’ll just have to play to find out, but it’s largely the same cast of characters that starred in the last “new” Tomb Raider game, 2006’s Legend.

Underworld is also the third Tomb Raider game created by Crystal Dynamics, who developed not only Legend, but the original Tomb Raider redux Anniversary, back in 2007.

This time around, you’ll guide Lara as she runs, jumps, dives, climbs, swims, shimmies, rides, swings and STRUTS her way through a total of 20 levels spread out over 8 chapters, taking you to such exotic locations as the Mediterranean, Thailand, Mexico, the Arctic Sea and, and of course, Croft Manor – although this may be the last time you see Lara there. Hmm…I wonder what THAT means?

The Tomb Raider games have always been about exploration, discovery, puzzle solving and, increasingly over the years, a bit of gunfire.  Although I’d heard that there was much more emphasis on combat tactics in Underworld, I’m happy to say that if combat isn’t your thing, you needn’t worry, as there really isn’t all that much of it. More happy news for people who’d rather spend their time jumping across chasms than putting a bullet in a Yeti’s head is the fact that whatever special combat moves are available in Underworld are entirely optional and unnecessary to complete the game.

There are some special baddies that you’ll have to deal with through the course of the game that I won’t mention so as not to ruin the surprise, but those aside, you’ll see the old Tomb Raider staples: spiders, bats, sharks and, much to the chagrin of PETA, tigers. Which could also explain the falloff in sales shipping to the Sigfried and Roy residence.

Most of Lara’s moves will be familiar, although there are no zip lines in Underworld. Something new, though, is that Lara can now carry certain special objects. In a number of places, you have to carry – and even throw – stone blocks on to pressure plates on the floor. It’s kind of cool to do this instead of sliding giant stone blocks over the plates (which could never be pushed over uneven terrain), but the game engine seems to have some weird physics issues with the blocks when you drop them, often resulting in some frustration as you have to place them on the floor a number of times before they stay where you put them.

By far the most frustrating thing about the game, though, is the horrible camera AI that will almost surely trap you in tight spaces from time to time, making it not only impossible to see anything around you, but probably even trapping you there for a few seconds, with no way to get out of the spot you’re in as the camera flips and swings around you.

On the plus side, though, the game’s locations are very nicely rendered and the puzzles are more fun than what I remember in Legend. I also like that the in-game menu uses the PDA paradigm again, but I’m not sure how much I like the way the weapons system has been revamped.

Gone are the days of finding weapons and ammo lying around for Lara to collect and use. Instead, Lara always has access to all of her weapons. Cool if you like to switch weapons a lot without having to find them first, but silly when you stop to think about where on earth this petite little heroine would store a pair of pistols, a spear gun, an assault rifle, a tranq gun, twin sub-machine guns and a shotgun all at the same time. Oh, and grenades. No…that’s not code, I mean actual grenades.

The way it works is that you can pick any weapon at any time to be able to quickly swap out with your pistols. The pistols still have unlimited ammo, but the other weapons each have a pre-set number of rounds per level. Once they’re gone, they’re gone and you need to pick a different weapon, or stick with the pistols.

If you’re into vehicles, you get only one in Underworld, which is Lara’s motorcycle. The bike actually plays into the exploration and puzzle solving more than it has in some of the previous games, which is a nice touch.

Of course along the way, there are many treasures and relics to find…little items that don’t affect the overall storyline gameplay but are extras to find as you explore. And once you finish the main storyline, you can go back into the game in Treasure Hunt mode to find anything missed the first time through.

Looks-wise, Crystal Dynamics have done a good job making Underworld look better than any Tomb Raider outing to date, with locations often looking much more realistic, lush and alive than in previous games. This is thanks, I would imagine, to a new engine and lighting methods.

Lara also looks better now than she ever has, with her figure a bit more realistic than in previous games, and with the old 3D character animations of former games giving way to full motion capture. Lara’s acrobatics were performed by gymnast Heidi Moneymaker…yes, that’s her real name and no, I don’t think she’s related to Miss Moneypenny…while Lara’s voice was performed by Keeley Hawes, who played Jason Statham’s wife in The Bank Job.

(I will say that Lara could look even better, considering how well humans are rendered in games these days, so hopefully if there’s another Tomb Raider forthcoming, Crystal Dynamics will spend some time updating the characters to be at least as good, visually, as those in games like Guild Wars or Left for Dead)

In all, I’d say that I had fun playing Tomb Raider Underworld. I thought the puzzles were challenging enough without having elements that were too obscure, and I thought the balance of exploration and puzzle solving to combat was almost dead on. I absolutely hated the camera AI, which frustrated me on more than one occasion, and, as with Legend, I thought that overall the game was too short (developers take note: this means I wished there was more to play). I still think that Tomb Raider 2 takes the cake as far as scope and size, but then again that was a game with a much suckier engine and likely gazillions-fewer polys to push around. Finally, I was annoyed that Underworld used save points, which you would think would’ve gone the way of the tiger…oops, I mean dodo…by now. Why on earth Crystal Dynamics chose to include them, especially on the PC version, is beyond me.

My final score for Tomb Raider Underworld is a 7.5 out of 10.