The game is a freeform sandbox, allowing the player to explore, dig, fabricate and build almost anything in its huge, pixelated, randomly generated world. Minecraft achieved cult status in 2010 and earned its creator, Markkus “Notch” Persson, a reputed fortune amassing almost 3m registered players and crucially almost 1m paying customers – incredible for an indie game made by just one person. Look out for Game Dev Story 2 coming soon. Game Dev Story makes watching your games grow from fledgling ideas into multi-million-selling hits almost as much fun as doing it for real. You can send your staff on inspirational yoga sessions, name your upcoming titles Super Mario Sisters or Grand Theft Auto: East Finchley, launch zany promotions, get panned by journalists, attend the launch of the new Sonny PlayStatus 2, hire mascots for your stall at the annual GameDex convention and see your game nominated at awards ceremonies. The interface is occasionally tricky and some screen area wasted, but this is soon forgotten as you become a virtual industry veteran.
The port could have been a bit more thorough. It works well when ported to the iPhone, keeping the original cute and minimal style and focusing on pared down, simple but precision-tuned game mechanics. You start as an upstart entrepreneur with an empty office and a few ideas, and in no time you are hiring staff, combining genres (Pirate Memory game anyone?), perfecting your game’s features, doing some press and releasing your masterpiece to the awaiting reviewers and fans. Its quite rare you gets to play a video game about your own job, but Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story turns the running of a games company into an incredibly addictive and fun management sim. Its on almost every platform, there is even a version in World of Warcraft, so go get it wherever you are. Its hugely addictive and perfectly tuned so that the difficulty ramps up exactly in line with your skills.
The humour is pitched just right, with witty zombie and plant bios, a jabbering neighbour called Crazy Dave and a theme song (composed by effortlessly amusing singer / songwriter Laura Shigihara) with an accompanying pop video that has had 5m views. The action shifts to your pool, your roof, night time and day time and the vast array of re-playable mini games pile up from level to level. There is so much content in this game, as the zombies arrive as American footballers, balloon-suspended clowns, pole vaulters, bespectacled old men, Thriller-inspired dancers and, er, dolphins. Zombies attempt to cross your lawn, whilst muttering “brains” under their breath, and your only defence is an expanding menu of weird and wonderful plants which eat them, shoot them, block them or blow them up. This might have originally been conceived as a tower defence game, but in the hands of Popcap casual games designer George Fan it developed into something simpler and more fun, in his words striking a balance between a “gritty” zombie game and a “sickeningly cute” plant game.
Plants vs Zombies (iPhone / iPad / XBLA / Windows / Mac / browser / Nintendo DS coming soon) What follows ignores sales, charts and ratings, though many here have done very well.ġ. Browser games appear alongside desktop games, XBox 360 titles and XBLA downloads in a roundup where excellent design, original mechanics and, most importantly, addictive play win the day. I played so much excellent output on all devices last year that, rather than focus on iPhone games as I did for 2009, I’ve decided this time to ignore platform altogether.