Once again, we end up with a terrible cell phone photograph, but the carving pops out a bit better this time. The pumpkin becomes a strange glowing effigy around the image of the zombie eating a plant.

If anyone else has a fun video-game themed jack-o’-lantern, feel free to send it in! We’d love to post more of these for everyone to enjoy.

Link, credit randall82 via Reddit.

For everyone else out there who have got Zen Gardens overgrown with various plantlife, and have been spending days collecting and uprooting marigolds for the fabled anti-zombie plants, this could be a fun addition. It will also add a social aspect to the game with XBLA achievements—and player housing? Needless to say, this still fits the PvZ paradigm well enough because we do have to defend our house after all.

Perhaps they’ll give us the ability to change the color of our tricycle?

Press Release

Dublin, Ireland – July 19, 2010 — PopCap Games, the worldwide leader in casual video games, today announced plans to release Plants vs. ZombiesTM for Xbox LIVE® Arcade (XBLA) this fall. With an anticipated launch in early September, Plants vs. Zombies on XBLA will deliver more game content than any previous iteration of the franchise, boasting seven game modes, including two all-new multiplayer modes, 12 unique achievements and 21 mini-games. Upon its release, Plants vs. Zombies for XBLA will be available for 1200 Microsoft Points (US$15.00).

“With a ton of new features and content exclusive to the XBLA version, we’ve pulled out all the stops to both expand and optimize this adaptation for a hard core gaming audience,” said Ed Allard, head of worldwide studios at PopCap. “The two new multiplayer modes allow gamers to work cooperatively to defeat hordes of invading zombies, or go head-to-head in a true ‘plants vs. zombies’ challenge. We’re also featuring a customized ‘house’ for tracking and sharing progress as well as a total of 21 mini-games and 12 achievements, all designed to enthrall Plants vs. Zombies players once again.”

Plants vs. Zombies for XBLA showcases many standout features, including:

• A total of seven game modes, including two new multiplayer modes: Co-Op and Vs. Mode
• 12 achievements and 21 mini-games – more than any other adaptation, and including the exclusive Heavy WeaponTM-inspired mini-game
• A goofy new way to track and share progress online, where players create their own custom house and cruise down the street to see their friends’ cribs!
• The highest resolution of any Plants vs. Zombies adaptation to date at 1920 x 1080
• All 50 levels of the original Adventure mode along with Puzzle, Survival, and Zen Garden

Link, via The Gamer With Kids blog.

Now, not only can you obsess over games whose rules could fit on the back of a business card, you can go portable with it, sneaking in rounds at work, while driving, during those long seconds between jumping out of the plane and opening your parachute, and so on.

Bookworm involves a caterpillaresque creature in massive spectacles named Lex, who devours words that you create from tiles on the screen. Think of it as Tetris by way of Scrabble.

Bejeweled Twist takes a field of gemstones, and tasks you with exploding them by turning and spinning the gems into groups and lines. It’s Tetris if all the pieces started on the screen, and you just tweaked them around to make the lines.

Here’s the press release.

The game presents itself with a somewhat flimsy but adorable narrative about a character trapped in a book about Greek mythology. Her name is Cassandra, a lovely, alabaster skinned Helena of Troy with green eyes and shimmering blonde hair who cries out to Lex for aid. As a bookworm, of course, he feels the need to do the gentlemanly thing, jump between the leaves and leap to her aid. To do so, he must wade through enemies right out of the Iliad and the Odyssey—with no small Greek names to go along with them.

Each chapter is basically a series of enemies who stand on one side of the screen, facing Lex, and wield all manner of weapons, claws, teeth, and foul magics against him. He fights back with his gift of gab—and sometimes truly wince-inducing wit—in the form of spelling words. The longer the word, the greater the damage inflicted on his opponent. This remains the basic puzzle solving mechanism throughout the game. His enemies and Lex himself both have a set of hearts representing health. Run out of hearts, lose the game.

From here, things get interesting.

The first element that adds RPG elements to this otherwise rail-shooter of a spelling puzzle game is a variety of interesting abilities that opponents have. They run a staple sort of attacks that poison or set Lex on fire, continuing to inflict extra damage over time; and also opponents who can stun him for a round while they line up to hit him again; but the real cheerful fun comes from those abilities that affect Lex’s spelling tiles. Some opponents are capable of cracking tiles, making them useless for inflicting damage.

The next element is special items—treasures purloined from beating bosses at the end of each chapter. Every special item adds another effect to Lex’s arsenal, from a special bow that makes tiles of ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’ inflict extra damage to foes when used to the golden fleece that reduces damage. While Lex can only carry three of these at a time, he can stack up quite an inventory to choose from which may change the player’s strategic inclination through different chapters.

Finally are puzzle elements involving the tiles; as the game progresses Lex can gain jeweled tiles from successfully spelling words over 4 letters long. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires—each of which causes its own special effect. Emerald: healing; amethyst: poisons enemy; ruby: lights the enemy on fire. To bring the tiles into effect, Lex needs only to use the letter tile with the jewel in the word he spells.

The primary complaint anyone might have about this game is that it’s extremely simplistic. It lacks overall challenge when it comes to word choice and developing strategy; but really the enjoyment of this game for us came from visiting mythological narratives, meeting strange an exotic characters, and getting to beat the everloving crap out of them with our spelling skills.

(And, of course, there is something truly amusing about beating Alexander with the word “EROTIC.”)

AstroPop presents itself as an action puzzler involving another color matching mechanism that we’ve seen many times before. It sets itself aside from other games by presenting a new way to approach this color matching. Bricks arrive from the top of the screen with the player at the bottom. The player flies a ship with the ability to grab blocks from the descending colorful menace up to a stack of four, and can release them back. Matching four or more blocks causes them to vanish as per usual.

While matching is certainly easy by just nabbing blocks and moving them around, it’s also quite possible to open up access to deep veins of blocks and to then eliminate them in one fell swoop. As the bricks become more and more random and mixed the more difficult it is to set up combos or even produce rapid matches—and as the game continues the roof will descend with accelerating speed.

Each of the characters also have special abilities affixed to their ships. Once triggered, the special can certainly turn the tide of the game. Two characters are immediately available; the other two must be “rescued” by playing through levels—there is a narrative to their rescues that can be read. The two we played had abilities that dealt with clearing out bricks with either firepower or by sweeping away segments of the playing field. Presumably the remaining two characters also had interesting special abilities to enhance game play.

Both special bricks and obstacles also come into play. Special bricks including explosive bricks that vaporize nearby bricks and hyperbricks that increase score. There are also “dead” bricks that cannot be matched to any others, but do pop when bricks near them are matched up.

The game, however, felt like it lacked replay value. Like any action style arcade it certainly kept us on our toes; however, as any astute reader has seen up to this point, us voces don’t like being kept on our toes by timers. The arcade style puzzler adds in the “falling doom” effect that makes it harder and harder to keep up with the rapidly descending wall of bricks, until finally we get crushed.

It’s hard to recommend this game even to avid arcade puzzle gamers. It’s a common meme found in a lot of games like this and it has been done better in the past.

The game itself is remarkably similar to the original title of Bejeweled: take a 2D grid of gemstones of various colors, exchange the positions of the precious gems to match them in rows, once matched they shatter and their neighbors collapse in to take up the emptied space. The twist of Bejeweled Twist, of course, happens to be all about “rotating” gems. Instead of the traditional, pick two and switch their places, the cursor instead spins four gems.

The matching still works similarly to the original game—make a match of three or more gemstones in a row or column and bam! there they go. For added effect, matching four jewels creates an exploding gem of the same type that, when matched, detonates, destroying the gems around it. Matching five creates a lightning gem that, also when matched, discharges electricity across the entire board vertically and horizontally, shattering all the gems it touches. Touching off a lightning gem can be exhilarating to watch.

In fact, with these new types of added gemstones and the special effects that follow them, scintillating and enjoyable combos can be triggered that dance like glorious fireworks. Here comes in a cute little addition for anyone who just couldn’t get enough of it once: Instant Replay.

Players are given an infinite number of spins to produce a match; but are given an incentive to get a match every time as there is a points accelerator attached to making matches. As the player makes matches it rises from x1 to x2 to … much, much higher. Except that every time the player fails to make a match they can lose a multiplier, until it falls all the way back to x1 and they have to rebuild it. The strategies invited by this become quite interesting: go for the combo that will set off a series of lightning and flame gems? or play it cool, matching three at a time while stacking on the multipliers?

To add strategies there are also in-game challenges to match particular gems in series. Managing to get those matches (without extra spins) adds quite a few points and a good feeling afterwards.

During game play obstacles are also thrown at the intrepid player. Pieces of coal get mixed into the mess. Coal cannot be matched; but it can be destroyed by fire and lightning gems. The next obstacle—existing in the normal game play—are explosives. These gems appear with counters on them that tick down with each spin. Fail to match/destroy a detonator gem before it’s spin counter times out and it goes critical. During critical the player is given one last chance to save themselves—and their game—from failure by playing a type of roulette. The odds get worse each time thereafter, so stopping bomb gems becomes a priority on later levels.

To add sheer challenge and joy to the game, Bejeweled Twist also has challenge levels specifically for people like us voces. These are a series of planets accessible from the main menu that set up particular challenges like: create a 5-combo, or destroy eight pieces of coal in one move, or shatter these types of jewels in this sequence. Finishing off these planets can be a great source of satisfaction, especially because some of them teach and demonstrate new strategies for game play involving the use of the twist mechanism to get gems into position and set them up to bring them crashing down.

As a casual game, Bejeweled Twist really kept our attention. It has a beautiful fireworks display sort of affect; keeps us on our toes while trying to keep our minds nimble during the boring workday; and has helped, more than once, to provide a much needed escape from idle doldrums.

At least—during a cursory examination.

Chuzzles appear to be cute blobs of fur, akin to Koosh balls with eyes. The object of the game is to shuffle rows of these fuzzy animals to that similarly colored chuzzles line up in as few as three. When this event happens they explode with a squeak and their eyeballs are sucked up into a flask on the side of the screen. Their eyeballs!

Chuzzle is a morbidly adorable color matching game where we are asked to pop cute, fuzzy animals and take their eyeballs.

Each level is ended with the flask corking itself, shaking up, and then expelling a spume of eyeballs into the heavens as the bonus points get added to the score.

Setting aside the ghoulishly cute effect of taking these creatures’ eyeballs, the game is addictive. The squeaking and purring of the chuzzles keeps me playing, and the music is extremely compelling. As you progress through the levels various obstacles get added to the chuzzle species in order to increase the challenge of the game.

The first type are exploding hyper-chuzzles—these little cross-eyed fuzzballs shake slightly with barely contained energy, pulsating on the screen—when they are matched up with more than two of their same-color brethren they detonate, knocking out all the chuzzles around them.

Then there are rainbow chuzzles. These are just a different type of colored chuzzle—at first we suspected they were wildcards, but they’re not, they only match with other rainbow chuzzles. They are rare enough that matching them up can be a challenge and they get in the way. There’s also extra points and a special sound they emit when they’re popped for their delicious eyeballs.

The next type are fat chuzzles—these giant Koosh balls look like normal chuzzles but instead of taking up only one slot, they take up four; moving them also moves two rows up or down instead of one row; and they will not go across the side of the screen and wrap around (striking the side of the screen they say, “Omf!” and little stars appear.)

Finally, there are locks which fall from the sky and shackle a chuzzle in place. From then on that chuzzle cannot be moved by the mouse, meaning that all chuzzles in the horizontal and vertical rows from it cannot be moved—a loud clank! sound emits when trying to move those rows. To kill the locks the bound chuzzle must be popped either by matching or a hyper-chuzzle. Locks are particularly devastating when they fall into line with a fat chuzzle because they then cause two rows to lock.

There are four different modes of play.

Classic: A game which plays out without a clock, just matching, until you run out of moves and you have to use a scramble (rather like a “life”—you have two.)

Speed Chuzzle: Fairly much what it says it is, you run against a clock bar at the bottom which fills up. As you match chuzzles and slurp up tasty eyeballs the clock is knocked back a few fractions of a second. A warning chimes when it gets 3/4s through; and if it reaches the end a lock falls and the timer starts over again. Locks, of course, increase the chances that you will run out of moves and need to burn a scramble (life.)

Zen Chuzzle: Bored at work? Zen Chuzzle is the forever chuzzle matching experience—no need for scrambles here, the matching never ends. Squeaking, purring, popping, and eyeball collection galore.

Mind Bender: Possibly the most fun and most frustrating gameplay mode. You are presented with levels of chuzzle patterns and then asked to match them to a picture. It takes clever thinking—especially outside-the-border in some cases—and a patient hand. There is no time limit, but some of the puzzles are particularly challenging when more colors are in play. (No eyeball suck involved.)

Gameplay hints are provided, but you don’t really need them. While the little critters do blink and glance around, if you wait long enough one of them will shiver or roll its eyes—that’s the chuzzle hinting that if it’s moved it will match up with other chuzzles. Just use that effect instead of clicking the “hint” button as that causes you to lose some eyeballs each time.

The game comes with a giant number of Easter eggs as well.

The little chuzzles react when clicked on with the mouse, as do the fat chuzzles. Here’s a list of things that you can cause to happen and how to get them to happen:

Giggle – Double click on the chuzzle or right click to get a cute giggle.
Burp – Click numerous times on the fat chuzzle to get a nice loud belch.
Dizzy – Drag a line of chuzzles back and forth to make them dizzy.
Grumpy – Leave your cursor on one of the chuzzles for a little bit and it will get grumpy and bat it off.
Bald – Click numerous times on a small chuzzle to make it sneeze and lose all of its hair.
Sleep – Let your chuzzles sit for more than 5 minutes and they will fall asleep.