Plants Vs. Zombies and Red Remover

A little flash-style game from Popcap, the premise of Plants Vs. Zombies is that you plant a variety of defenses made up of plants to ward off a zombie attack. You have pea shooters that attack zombies, sunflowers who bring more sun to grow more plants, and as the game progresses, you get more variety in your front yard, including such things as man-eating plants and psychedelic mushrooms that turn the zombies on your side.

The pea shooters have those little vacant doll eyes that blink every so often, the sunflowers are always smiling, and there's Crazy Dave who sells you things and talks about "Squirdos".

The game moves smoothly and passes the time pleasantly, and if you're feeling mighty girly, it's cute, too. Check it out, it's only a 30mb download, and the "trial" version has plenty to play through, so it's worth the small tug on your bandwidth.


In the other corner we have... Red Remover. Since I felt inspired to talk about Plants Vs. Zombies, I figured I might as well mention the minor discovery I made a few months prior.

Red Remover is, as most sites seem to label it, a "physics remover" game. This is true. Beyond that, it's incredibly simple and incredibly addictive. You have the red boxes that are "miserable" and need to be removed, and you have green and (later), purple boxes that are neutral and need to stay on the screen and act as stable platforms for the green boxes to remain.

While this sounds pretty damn dry, the neat thing about Red Remover is that the first dozen levels are a breeze to slide through, but you want to keep doing more simply because it's easy at first and every time you complete a level, the sound of children going "Yea!" can be heard and you remember the triumphant feelings you had when you heard those sounds when you were a child winning a game. It gives that feeling of simplistic accomplishment, and since it's so easy, what will another level hurt?

Make it to all forty levels, and see how much time has passed. I guarantee that while most of them seem pretty simple, after a while you realize that they're spacial brain teasers which require you to figure out how the physical objects need to maintain their course from point A to point B and that that can get moderately complex if you're not careful and focused.

It's fun, I swear.

Oh, and did I mention that the boxes all have little faces that either pout or smile, which, again, if you're feeling girly, is damn cute to look at.

And Yet Again, I'm Surprised That the Internet Surprised Me

Go ahead, give it a look-see.

Some could consider this fetish art, but that would imply that the artist does this for sexual gratification.

Honestly, I sort of wonder if it's not sexual at all, but instead they're just fascinated with engrossed curves and gigantism...and anime chicks.


My personal favorite. I'm convinced this one will give you nightmares if you stare at it long enough.

Black Lace - Agadoo

I recall the first time a friend of mine heard the "Crazy Frog" song and if memory serves correctly, she said it was shit like that which made foreigners want to bomb America.

Similar in its animosity that it evokes when listened to, this song pulls me into two very harsh extremes.

Part of me wishes to dance like a five year old and drink Shirley Temples.

The other part wishes to bomb the UK for having resurrected and covered a little French cancan song that should never have been unearthed from whence it came beneath the deep dark sludge of failure.

2012 (the film)

Roughly eight or nine minutes prior to the climatic/heartwarming/life-affirming finish to the movie, the celluloid burned. Literally.

If you want to make sense of that, it got pulled close to the light bulb (probably due to being strung hastily or wrong), and began to singe. To save as much as possible, when you see this happen, it needs to be pulled off the loops away from the projector immediately.

Was it some ultimate sign that the end truly is near? A bad omen? Should we stay or go? Well, we waited about five minutes, then they said we could get free passes to see it at another time or wait another six minutes and finish it then.

We chose to stay, and although about two to three minutes were lost (had to be snipped), the film returned, and we got to see the end.

In short, Roland Emmerich's new baby totally got burrrrrned!

And I was there to see it. Epic.



Oh right, how was the movie? Well, it was better than 10,000 B.C., that's for damn sure.

But I liked it, the graphics were good (much better than those WTF-is-wrong-with-those wolves from The Day After Tomorrow), the story worked, it was just as scant on scientific truth as I'd hoped it'd be, and it did it's job. Lots of people were buried, drowned, crushed, and set on fire. John Cusack was...John Cusack.

In short: entertaining. If you enjoyed the awesome badness of The Day After Tomorrow, then you might not mind this.

I still wish I knew what went wrong after Stargate and Independence Day. I have a theory that he and Uwe Boll crossed paths right before the unmentionable Americanized "G" film was made. If you're familiar at all with Emmerich's work, you'll know what the G stands for.

One last thing. If you are indeed familiar with Emmerich's films, I believe it's important to note that unlike his other epic features of the past, the heartfelt we're-gonna-die-but-be-strong-anyway speeches were significantly shorter this time around. He gets an honorable mention for that. He must have figured out that after about a minute and a half, no one cares.