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Name: Plants Vs. Zombies
Developer: Nice Code
Release Date: 2012
Platform: Famicom/NES
Earlier this year, I gave a short history and discussion about the global phenomenon that is Angry Birds, while also featuring all the Angry Birds pirate demakes I could find. I gave my stance as being pretty "meh" about the whole franchise, with me thinking that the games are fine, but not really my thing. While I enjoy the aesthetics and sense of humor, I just don't have the patience for level after level of tower destruction, firing dozens of different birds at pigs in hastily built scaffolding, trying for hours to three-star hundreds and hundreds of different levels. I can see why it's such a huge deal, but it's just not for me.
Though I'll gladly play any of the official games in their entirety before playing the pirate games again...
Today, however, we're going to be tackling another game phenomenon that's taken the world by storm(though in a lesser capacity) that I AM crazy about, and that is usually bundled with Angry Birds in pop culture: Plants Vs. Zombies. Released by PopCap Games the same year as Angry Birds, though beating it to release by over half a year, it's a simplified tower defense game where players grow weaponized plants to fend off wave after wave of zombies, all of whom have decided to single out your house as the "home of the tastiest brains in the world!" There are dozens of different plants to pit against dozens of different zombies, and you'll need a careful balance of all of them to fight off the mysteriously coordinated attacks across your front lawn, your backyard, and even your rooftop! ...So, basically Harvest Moon meets Left 4 Dead meets Defend Your Castle. ...It works.
Like Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies isn't just seen as one of the best games of its type, but a game that DEFINES its genre! As Angry Birds is likely the first game you think of when you think of physics-based "knock 'em down" puzzlers, Plants Vs. Zombies is probably the game that comes to mind when you think "tower defense." Like Angry Birds, Plants Vs. Zombies is also a unique, hilarious idea that blends mindless(heh heh) fun and destruction with careful management and strategic thinking. In fact, PvZ could be considered the ANTI-Angry Birds, as you're trying to build your base and DEFEND from advancing enemies, as opposed to flinging your troops to their deaths against easily-breakable walls. It's the game's similar sense of humor, the various plants and zombies with various attacks, the challenge and adaptability for both novice and experienced players, and the variety in its gameplay(arguably more than Angry Birds offers) that have made Plants vs. Zombies a highly-acclaimed, multiple award-winning, INCREDIBLY playable and timeless game that will likely be around for years to come!
Especially since these franchises provide eternal fuel for mashups!
The franchise's success can't be understated. Since its release, it's become one of PopCap's highest grossing and most marketable games ever made, with millions of both digital and physical copies sold across a multitude of platforms ranging from smartphones to tablets to PCs to even consoles, where puzzle games have a hard time thriving. For the first game's release on iOS alone, it sold over 300,000 copies, earning PopCap over a million dollars! To this day, whether through purchasing the games or the various add-on DLC for the titles, PopCap has earned millions solely from this franchise! And for a company that basically originated downloadable puzzle games with Bejeweled, then redefined the genre over and over again with Insaniquarium, Feeding Frenzy, Peggle, Bookworm, etc., they've proven not only does lightning strike twice for them, but that they're good friends with Zeus himself and buy bottled lightning from him in bulk!
The first game went so well, that, like Angry Birds, sequels and spinoffs inevitably followed. A direct sequel, Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, was released for Android and iOS devices in 2013, followed by the spinoff Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare for consoles in 2015, a sequel to that in 2016, and the Plants Vs. Zombies Heroes card game for iOS and Android the same year! All of which are still being maintained, updated, and played by millions to this day!
And that's not counting the various merchandise based on the series. While nowhere near the level of Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies has still seen its share of cash-ins. Action figures, books, plush toys, board games, fast food toys, Funko POP!, and even a comic series have all been produced based on the PvZ universe! And I actually like how there's not as much as Angry Birds. They've covered all the bases without permanently stamping their name with a small, magical sticker man that constantly screams "SELLOUT!"
Plus, there are building sets based on this franchise. That's all anyone needs!
Also, they didn't make a movie based on their property. You'd think that wouldn't be something to brag about, but, considering Rovio's take on filmdom, I think PopCap's the winner by NOT making an effort...
Like I mentioned earlier, while I think Angry Birds is passable, I'm REALLY into the Plants vs. Zombies series of games! My family's always been a fan of PopCap, ever since we first hooked up to the internet around the early 2000s, so we've been playing Bejeweled, Insaniquarium, Feeding Frenzy, etc. for quite some time. My mom introduced me to this certain game around when it was first released, and I was HOOKED! So hooked, I found my own copy when I moved out, which was the Game of the Year Edition packaged with some other PopCap games, and played it basically all throughout college! I was hooked on the humor, the graphics, the easy-to-learn-but-difficult-to-master gameplay, and the various minigames, and I could play it for hours at a time. When I finally got my own smartphone, I put Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time on there and played THAT for hours on end! I also bought Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare and all expansions when they were on sale for my Xbox 360. ...I didn't know what it was when I bought it and I'm not into these online multiplayer co-op shooters(especially since my internet service is slower than dial-up most of the time), so I haven't given it much attention, but from what I did play, I think they adapted the basic elements of the franchise into a Team Fortress 2-esque game just fine! And, just recently, I decided to replay the series, downloading the Android games back onto my phone and playing through them again. I haven't played Plants vs. Zombies Heroes yet, since I want to play them in order and I only just completed the first game and all achievements, but I'm excited to see how that game plays! PopCap, their games, and especially Plants vs. Zombies have a fan in me, and if they ever succumb to the zombie plague that will result in the apocalypse, yet they're still sentient and making games, but they still need brains to survive...! ...Well, get someone else. How am I supposed to play their awesome games if they empty my cranium?!
Also, I own a couple PvZ comics. ...They're ok...
Being a fan of both Plants vs. Zombies and pirate games, you can imagine my surprise when I found out that the franchise had joined Angry Birds in being unofficially redesigned and ported to both 8- and 16-bit consoles! ...It doesn't take much imagination, admittedly, since I knew by that point that no popular franchise is safe from pirate developers looking for a quick buck, but I knew I had to try them out. And now that I have, I'm tying you to the back of a Zomboni(not a typo) and dragging you along for the ride! Let's look at some demakes of Plants vs. Zombies!
Since there are only two console versions of PvZ, unlike the multiple Angry Birds knockoff games, I might as well give each game its own review. Starting with the 8-bit Famicom port, represented by this perfect recreation of the original title screen! ...And by "perfect", I mean "Somebody made their fifth-grader spend the afternoon drawing a title screen in MS Paint..."
This is normally where I pointlessly discuss and pick apart the cartridge. ...Except I don't have a cartridge of this. From what I can tell, a standalone cartridge doesn't exist of this game! It's possibly because this game was made in 2012, long after even China and Taiwan gave up on 8-bit consoles, so a standard plastic shell cartridge wouldn't sell well even in the programmer's home market.
However, this game does pop up in recent multicarts and compilation consoles, so it's still available for anyone to purchase and play! ...For more than the actual game costs...
I briefly showed this game as being a part of the CoolBaby 600-in-1, so that's another bonus for anyone wanting to cheap out on getting a real NES Classic. You get to play cheap pirate games in HD!
However, the footage for this review was recorded from a handheld system I own: The Game Prince. This is a console I own by accident, as I thought I was getting a system with another version of Plants vs. Zombies(which I did eventually find.) Still, it's a 152-in-1, and it has TV Out, so it's worth keeping around.
While no programmer is mentioned or confirmed, the design and music tracks suggest that this game comes to us courtesy of Nice Code. I briefly mentioned them in my NES Titanic, Tom & Jerry 3, and Angry Birds Showcase reviews, but it's finally time to give them a chance in the spotlight. They started in 1999 as Nature Color Game in Xi'an, China, and they've had a hand in pretty much everything pirate and 8-bit.
If JungleTac(whom I mentioned as the programmer for most, if not all, of the Vs Maxx 50-in-1 games) was responsible for half of all the games found on "Original" Pirate/Bootleg 8-bit consoles, Nice Code takes the blame for the other half. Much of their output is comprised of small, hastily programmed and stupefyingly simple games, made exclusively to fill out multicarts and cheap Plug n Play systems.
As JungleTac helped Senario gain a foothold in the budget Plug n Play market, so Nice Code also aided third-party controller & accessory manufacturer Dreamgear in producing most of their own consoles. ...I really don't want to revisit this territory...
A few of the small titles they released also star "Nature Clan", who appears to be the company mascot. Pfft. A company including a mascot in their work in a vain hope it'll stand out and put their name on the map.
Ridiculous, am I right, Brick?
Besides producing games even shovelware would shovel away, they also released larger games, mostly hacks of already released games. This output, which continues to this day, is mostly comprised of hacked Atari and Intellivision games emulated to run on Famicom technology.
However, as employees from Dragon Co.(the company behind Titanic and Tom & Jerry 3) began joining the team, eventually leading to Dragon Co.'s assets being fully acquired by Nice Code, they also released reskins and retitles of a number of Dragon Co. games. Howling Killer(The Lion King III: Timon and Pumbaa), Primitive Man/Primitive Woman(Tom & Jerry 3), Sunken Ship(Titanic), etc. However, most of these titles were released almost exclusively on Plug n Play/handheld consoles towards the end of major 8-bit game distribution, and, as such, are hard to come by. ...Not that you'd want to own them, seeing as how most of the original titles are still available and being produced today...
They also took a bit of contract work, most notably developing RPGs like Alien vs Predator and Tomb Raider for Shenzhen Nanjing. ...And a word of warning to anyone curious about Nanjing's output: Stick only with the Pokemon Yellow and Final Fantasy VII demakes!
Nice Code, like JungleTac, is surprisingly still around today, licensing their work out to cheapo Plug n Play and multicart distributors. And their work is even copyrighted by Qi Sheng Long, another producer and distributor of unofficial games and equipment! So not only do I need to endure Nice Code's work, but I have a chance of being sued for my trouble!
Unless, of course, I defeat Sheng Long! Should be easy, right?
After the title screen, the game immediately starts up with the usual Plants vs. Zombies lawn area. No tutorial, no plant selection, no background story, just straight into the action. ...As it is.
Now, the first thing you'll want to do when you start the game is TURN OF THE SOUND! This game uses the EXACT same 10-second looping track from Nice Code's Angry Birds demake(which I featured in the Angry Birds Showcase), and it is UNBEARABLE to listen to! There's literally no other sound besides the loop, so you'll miss nothing if you mute the TV/console while you play. ...In fact, you may have just saved yourself from a stroke...
Besides the awful music and lack of sound, another thing you'll notice when you first start the game is that they committed the cardinal sin of console gaming: Using a mouse cursor! Instead of mapping actions to buttons as the official console ports do, this game retains the PC method of clicking and dragging, which, as anyone who's tried to control a pointer with a directional pad knows, is EXTREMELY clunky and imprecise! I can tolerate cursors being used for certain short, unaggravating sections, like the menu selection in Winnie The Pooh: Piglet's Special Day or the puzzle section in My Little Pony: Grand Puzzleventure, despite the fact that they're completely unnecessary, but when that's the entire game, you've sadly joined the ranks of Techno Source's Sudoku console. ...And NOBODY wants to be compared to that waste of plastic...
The game plays mostly like your generic version of Plants vs. Zombies. Get sunlight, plant plants, fend off zombies, the bare bone mechanics are all here. However, due to memory and graphical constraints, the only plants you're given are Sunflower, Peashooter, Repeater, Wall-Nut, Squash, and Potato Mine. ...Though the game's only 5 levels long, so you likely won't need more than that to complete it.
Especially since you have plenty of time to collect sunlight and plant your plants, as the zombies in this game are slow. ...Wait, did I say "slow"? I meant SSSSSSSSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW! Most of the zombies in the original didn't move that quickly, either(being, you know, zombies), but they don't compare to this version's living dead! I had to speed up the footage above, but they take a good 20 seconds to traverse ONE square! You could set up your base, grab a pizza at Papa Murphy's, bake it, eat it while watching a full season of Steven Universe, then write and publish "Steven Universe and Philosophy" before the zombies make it across your lawn! Since it takes so long for the zombies to make it to your front door and you have your plants long set up before then, that makes this one of the easiest games on the planet. Right?
...Actually, wrong! The zombies move much slower, and there are fewer onscreen due to the Famicom's inability to handle large numbers of sprites, but Nice Code made up for these factors by making the zombies VERY resilient to second death! Using a normal Peashooter against a normal zombie, it takes 52 hits to finally go down! Nearly NINETY seconds are dedicated to felling just ONE of these creatures, giving them enough time to make it across the screen and start munching on your plants! Thankfully, your plants also take longer to get munched, so one zombie won't be that much trouble. ...But when you have zombies across the screen, and several in one lane, even a line of Peashooters won't defend you against this The Walking Dead-level menace!
As always, Wall-Nuts are your friends and a necessity!
You may notice that the graphics in this game are... Lacking, to say the least. Like the title screen, and like Nice Code's Angry Birds 3 game, everything's been redrawn, so we at least don't have to suffer through heavily compressed sprites and backgrounds like with most of these 8-bit demakes. ...However, they also look like someone hastily drew some doodles on a napkin and scanned them in! They are BEYOND amateur, looking like a three-year-old who's drawn his favorite cartoon characters in crayon! If I wasn't already very familiar with the original game, I'd have no idea who these characters were!
They didn't even bother to color in the Peashooters, Repeaters, or zombies. They're simply tracings that blend into the background! The existing colors aren't that great, either, being comprised of the standard ugly oranges, browns, and greens for most knockoff games, but seriously?! You're just going to leave them to be colored in like an ancient Space Invaders game?!
Back before the wizard Krandalf the Fabulous invented color?
The horrible color clashing and the transparency of the sprites also makes it hard to find sunlight, which is represented by a VERY slight orange and yellow tint. Like the regular game, sunlight will occasionally fall from the sky, but won't stop in this game until it reaches the bottom, where you can easily miss it while you're focusing on planting your army!
Sunlight from the Sunflowers is also generated much more slowly than the actual game, and always drops to the bottom of the screen. It blends so well into the background, I didn't even know the Sunflowers were producing sun at first, and thought this game was broken and unwinnable! This is why I highly recommend playing this game on a console connected to an HDTV. It's hard enough to see on a regular screen, but on a 2-inch handheld console, it's virtually impossible! You'd be better off staring into the actual sun!
The redrawn zombies also look like the Elephant Man with their shrunken sprites. ...I think that's enough of a joke.
There's not much else to say about the game. Once you've adjusted to the game's lack of speed and surprising resilience, the rest is just like playing a dumbed-down version of the real thing. Plant your plants, find sunlight, plant more plants, and ride out the zombie invasion! Maybe have a salad afterwards.
Later levels introduce zombies wearing traffic cones and pails and carrying screen doors. Maybe they're less prone to pain than the regular zombies, but so many projectiles were being thrown by this point, I didn't get a chance to count.
As more and more zombies show up, you get to experiment with the other plants. Potato Mines explode like in the real game, though they still need some time to activate. Luckily, zombies don't chow down on them in this version.
And, for the more immediate emergencies, Squash squashes. There's no recharge period for the plants in this version, either. If you have enough sunlight, you can just deal out the same plant over and over again! ...Though, with how slowly sunlight appears, you're better off quickly fixing the breach in your defenses than wasting sunlight on one-use plants. So that's another bit of fun from the original this version lacks...
Sort of amusingly, this version still incorporates the lawnmowers. I guess I'm just surprised that they went to the trouble of keeping this mechanic, given how simplistic the rest of the game is. And, since you're not given any coins for remaining lawnmowers at the end of the game, have a blast! Let the zombies make it to the end and get your lawn mowed! ...Of course, you'll be picking bits of the undead out of your grass afterwards... I don't think Weed-B-Gon will help this situation...
Once you complete all 5 stages, it simply gives you the standard barely-visible "Clear" message shown at the end of each of these stages, followed by a kick back to the title screen.
Bad news for anyone expecting an 8-bit rendition of "There's A Zombie On Your Lawn"
I did go back and patiently wait for the zombies to make it to my front door. In this case, you just get a Game Over, and a kick back to the title screen. ...Not that I was expecting anything else...
And that's the 8-bit demake of Plants vs. Zombies. ...And I gotta admit, I'm impressed. The effort they put into this game, the graphics quality, the exciting gameplay, the replay value, are all done wonderfully! This is a game that I can see also existing as a popular title for the latest models of tablet!
...Like the Apple Newton...
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Design: Doesn't come on a physical cartridge, so not applicable.
Controls: Despite having to control a mouse cursor with a directional pad, they're not as difficult or tedious as you'd expect. The cursor and squares are large, so it doesn't take forever to move from one side of the screen to the other. Since it's a slow-moving puzzle game, there's not a lot of pressure put on you to place plants or collect sun, so it's less stressful to control than if it had the pace of the actual game. Overall, despite using a pointer, the controls still work fine for the type of game this is. ...I just wish they chose something more fitting for a console control scheme.
Graphics: While the cartoonishly simple graphics for the real game are hilarious, the cartoonishly simple graphics for this game are... Pathetic. Everything's redrawn, so I don't have to strain my eyes to make out a heavily compressed image like with most 8-bit demakes, but they're redrawn so badly, it legitimately looks like their art department was a kindergarten class! The Sunflowers look like your standard drawing of a sunflower with a simple face drawn on it, the Wall-Nuts look like soulless food mascots from Japan, the Peashooters and Repeaters look the most like their original counterparts but lack any kind of shading, the zombies look like cavemen in business suits, and everything else looks like a formless lump. Not to mention the ugly color scheme common with pirate games that makes everything look like a coloring book where the only crayons available were brown, green, and gray! The color mixture is so bad, and the sprite flicker is so annoying, that it's easy to lose track of sunlight and certain plants. The only good point I'll give anything is that I can tell one thing apart from another and, since I'm familiar with the original game, I could tell what each redrawn character was. Other than that, the art is laughably amateur, and I'm wondering if the fact they redrew the characters instead of compressing sprites was a good thing in this case...
Music & Sound: Only one unbearable track of music that plays for 10 seconds and loops. Literally nothing else. The game would have been better off completely mute.
Gameplay: It plays almost exactly like a simplified version of the original game. You're given six plants and a shovel to work with, and you're only required to fight off the basic forms of zombie, none of which seem to be mechanically different. The only major difference is that everything's slowed to a crawl! The zombies move slowly, the plants fire slowly, the sun pops up slowly, it takes much longer to destroy zombies and for them to munch plants, it's all just VERY slow and tedious! The only difficulty is in trying to set up the plants to take down a line of zombies, since only one zombie is damaged at a time, but, since there's no recharge period for the plants, you can just whip out the Squash and Potato Mine to clean up any roaming zombies the Peashooters missed. It's a very, VERY slow-moving game, with only 5 levels and no changes across any of them, and only if you're an idiot trying to review it would you want to see it all the way through.
Replay Value: You can finish the entire game in under 30 minutes, and since it basically plays itself, there's not much to play through the first time!
Overall:
The score's a bit higher than I intended just because I'm amused a game with this concept was remade for 8-bit consoles. And in 2012! The graphics are ugly, the music's unbearable, and the gameplay is unbelievably slow! There's nothing here that the real thing hasn't done a million times better! And you can get the real thing for free nowadays! I'd only recommend this if you're REALLY curious how an 8-bit version of Plants vs. Zombies works. And even then, I think you're better off just watching a gameplay video on YouTube. I'd sic the zombies on the people who made this game. ...But I don't think they had brains to start with...
Alright! One down, one to go. Let's see how the game plays when they double the bits!
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