On a Particularly Addicting Game

Okay, it's been a while since I've updated this blog and I have a number of reasons for that. I've been working on getting out of my parents house, have been looking for a job, I just started DMing a summer D&D campaign (more on that later), and most of all I found PopCap Games' Plants vs. Zombies on Steam for $9.99.

Oddly enough, PopCap's official site has Plants vs. Zombies listed at $19.95. I could understand the price difference if Steam was a subscription based service, but it's a free download. I guess it pays to shop around whether you're shopping online or in person.

This damn game has decided to steal away more of my time then I thought I had. Last night at about 2AM I stared into my laptop screen with a kind of hypnosis that had previously been experienced only with EverQuest and World of Warcraft. As the small hand-rendered peas flicked across the screen into the pasty faces of my undead assailants I realized I had a problem.

While protecting one's brain from the undead is a noble pursuit in its own right, time would be better spent scoping out my new apartment for potential escape routes and choke points should I be living there when the zombie apocalypse goes down. Or at the very least, play more Left 4 Dead which is far and away a better zombie simulator as sunflowers and pea pods are probably an unsatisfactory defense.

At least that would be potentially productive. In a paranoid, dorky kind of way.

So I guess the point of all this is to recommend Plants vs. Zombies as an entertaining way to spend an evening as long as you already have your World War Z plan prepared; just make sure to get it on Steam rather than from PopCap.com.

Dungeons and Dragons

I've been a huge fan of Western RPGs ever since my first session of Morrowind despite the fact that I had to buy a new monitor because of the streaks I left on my old one from that fateful day. Between my love of interactive storytelling, my overactive imagination and all my failed attempts at tabletop gaming in my youth it's really surprising that I've never truly been introduced to D&D before.

Well, last night I got to play my first few turns in a rather unorthodox D&D campaign. A friend of mine is hosting a campaign with his younger brother and a couple of kids from his neighborhood. I guess their regulars didn't come out last night so I was called to sit in on the game. I arrived late into the evening because I thought it important to watch my beloved Minnesota Vikings get dismantled by the Phillidelphia Eagles which took longer than I had hoped. In the end, I only played a couple of turns, but those couple of turns really opened up my eyes.

When I say this game was unorthodox, that's an understatement. Instead of swords, sorcery, and the aforementioned dungeons and dragons, this campaign was designed around the American south west after the zombie apocolypse. So instead of dungeon crawling or hiking through enchanted forests, we were clearing zombies out of a drug lord's mansion in southern California.

In most game worlds, rules are the key to maintain order, but D&D is run purely by the imagination. This is a concept that everyone knows, but it doesn't really dawn on you until you have this interaction:

DM: "It's your turn."

Me: "What can I do?"

DM: "Well, what do you want to do?"

Me: "I want to kick that zombie in the face."

DM: "Roll to hit."

I think I could grow to like this game.

Another thing that I just need to throw out there: Why is it that D&D players are believed to have no friends when the game is designed to be played in groups? Just a thought.

-That Guy