Have You Played... Plants Vs Zombies?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I’m struggling to think of a game’s name that has gone from being one of eliciting such joy to such uninterest. The flagship title of PopCap’s collapse from astonishingly successful casual game developer to the fragmented remains left behind after an EA-destructo-buyout, Plants Vs Zombies was once a cult PC delight, making tower defence accessible to all. Now it’s a third-person shooter or something.

But wow, what a time we had with that original game. In 2009, when RPS was young, we were gobbling up all the mad titbits that appeared about it, and not least the wonderful song from Laura Shigihara. And then thankfully, the game was just lovely. A genre few at RPS had time for was taking up all our time, as we defended the house from invading hordes of zombies, with only plants as our friends.

Bursting with PopCap’s (then) vibrant silliness, and guiding a casual audience carefully down the path to some properly tricky difficulty, it sits alongside Portal and Peggle as one of the most important cultural moments in our site’s development. And a rather lovely game while it’s at it.