User blog:Tecku/TT: Why the Far Future Was Great

Welcome back to TT (Tecku Talks). As you may know, I've done a few blog posts about the Dark Ages and Big Wave Beach (namely, my negative opinion on them). Indeed, for a lot of my upcoming Tecku Talk pages, I will be anaylyzing why some ideas work and why other don't work. Unfortunately, a lot of the material on my list seems to come off as critzism instead of praise. Therefore, I would like to get out at least one post about Popcap's shining work.

Tecku Talks About: The Far Future, and why it was great!

First, let's discuss new plants. The Far Future was packed with a plethora of fresh material, but most noticable were the new plants. The player was granted a whopping seven new plants to mess around with (eight if Starfruit is included). Furthermore, of those plants, can you recall how many of them were new to the genre? Not two, not three, not four, not even five, but six of those plants were built from the ground-up. Think about it. Before Far Future, the number of truly new plants we got per world was three. Egypt had three, Pirate Seas had three, and Wild Wild had three.

Furthermore, of those truly new plants, only Infi-Nut was based on a previous plant. This means that each to the five other plants were given a mechanic unique to the gameplay, creating a lot more variety for the player. That's a lot of new!

The Far Future also introduced five unique new zombies, further boosting the amount of new content. However, new zombies mean nothing if they are not fun to play against. Good thing these zombies ARE fun to play against! Let's go over them:

- Shield Zombie had a great, unique mechanic. The sheild can really drive a zombie horde, and forces the player to mix up their stategies. However, unlike Jester Zombie, Sheild Zombie has a lot of weaknesses, too. He can be disabled with E.M.Peach. He is absolutely shut down by Laser Bean, Snapdragon, and Spikeweed. His sheild can be overloaded with constant fire. And perhaps most noticeably, his sheild is disabled upon reaching a plant. These weakness create just as much strategies as they do destroy, and keeps the gameplay fun.

- Jetpack Zombies are great at what they were built for. They can clear ill-prepared defeses quickly with their ability, but they have set weaknesses. Blover shuts them down, as does Tall-Nut, as well as any strong defense.

- Mecha Coneheads are fairly generic, but add a lot of ultility to E.M.Peach, Citron, and Magnifying Grass. Keeping in mind that we haven't seen Knight Zombies yet, this is an overall solid choice.

- Disco Tron 3000 has two weaknesses: E.M.Peach and Blover. It can also be dealt with via Cherry Bomb. In these levels, you will probably be packing at least one of these, so it works well.

- Mecha Football Zombie is easily the most annoying of these zombies, but E.M.Peach makes it more than tolerable, as does Spikeweed/Spikerock.

So, what do you notice? That's right- EVERY zombie has multiple plants that can deal with them. Furthermore, since E.M.Peach overlaps most of them, the player can deal with a plethora of different types of zombies without sacrificing choice. Countering the waves does require strategy (which is good), but the player is given tools that make it not only possible, but possible in different ways (which is good).