I wanted to talk about some of the new things we are doing on the site as well as a bit about some of the technology we use to make Cheerful Ghost. I put the finishing touches on a new private message system this weekend and am pretty happy with the result. A week or so ago CapnCurry asked me how he could distribute Card Hunter beta keys to people on the site and I didn't have a good recommendation for him. He suggested a simple message system and the gears in my head turned a bit. I spent a week thinking about how to build things and spend a few days hacking on it.

how private messages work

If you want to send a private message to anyone on the site you can do that in a few ways. If you are in a comment chain and want to send someone a message there is a message icon you can click to send. If you are viewing someones profile there is also a message icon you can click to send a message. The message system is very simple and I borrowed heavily from how text messages work. To manage all the messages you have, in the drop down there is a private messages inbox with each private message thread available to read. Want to start a new thread? Send a new private message or continue where you left off.

the cheerful ghost roundtable

The Cheerful Ghost Roundtable is a new YouTube video cast by members of the Cheerful Ghost community about awesome stuff in gaming. We film each new episode of the Roundtable every two weeks live over Google Hangout. Right now the show is published to the main page but as we continue with it, you will be able to subscribe to it in iTunes and any other Podcast program you use. I will also put a link to each episode in a new "Roundtable" navigation area page in the next month or so.

We just finished up Episode 3 last night and I am very happy with how that turned out. I want the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable to be something really special and if you have any suggestions or ideas on how to do that, let me know. If you have a topic suggestion, let me know.

If you haven't watched them yet, why not start with episode one?

Episode 1 - "The Indie Revolution": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy_D1tdNXv4
Episode 2 - "The Internet Hate Factory": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-IwC9j1U8g
Episode 3 - "CONSOLES!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAcMDGJcHI

responsive design & why it matters

I started Cheerful Ghost with some pretty awesome goals. One of those goals was that the site had to work the same on mobile, tablets and desktop browsers. I set that as a goal because as a software engineer I have worked for many companies that don't do that and I wanted to be able to ship something that works the way I think it should. I decided from the starting code I wrote, the site would keep this in mind.

I started with a pretty basic "responsive design" framework when the site first launched. I was pretty new to design and the front end so the first design of Cheerful Ghost was pretty rough. The site worked the same on phones, tablets and desktops but it lacked polish and the shine the site has now.

Cheerful Ghost received a pretty awesome overhaul a year after launch and the fruits of that you see now. Since then the site has evolved but the core tenant of keeping the site working the same on phones, tablets and desktops hasn't changed.

In fact, one fun way to test how that works is by dragging the edge of your browser around. In most browsers you can see the site "respond" to its new width and adapt. Many sites on the Internet don't do that and this is one really cool feature of Cheerful Ghost I love. It responds to the browser it lives in.

One technology we use to make this happen is the Open Source responsive design framework, Bootstrap 2.3.2. Recently Bootstrap 3.0 was released and after PAX I am going to spend time to upgrade the site to Bootstrap 3.0. Bootstrap 3.0 is a great new release that was built from the ground up to consider mobile first. What this means is that certain elements it provides that were not awesome on mobile, will now be. It also changes a few elements visually and drops support for some older web browsers.

As Cheerful Ghost improves we can't keep compatibility with everything. As such we are going to drop support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6. I don't think this will impact too many people because according to our logs Internet Explorer is our 5th used browser and only one person came to the site last month in IE 7. That said over the next year we will drop support for IE 8 and that browser isn't widely used on the site either. I'd love to keep support for everything, but as as a lone developer I can only do so much. :D

http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/
http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/08/19/bootstrap-3-released/

Thanks for making Cheerful Ghost the coolest gaming community on the net and I hope to see you in the upcoming months!

In this episode we discuss the PS4, XBox One, Wii U, Steam Box and the current generation of consoles. We also talk a bit about what sucked in the last gen. and what we want to see going forward.

During the middle portion of the video I was experiencing technical difficulties, which happens from time to time with a live show on Google Hangout. On one hand, technical difficulties suck but on the other hand, hilarious!

Show Notes:

• Plants vz Zombies 2: http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1550


• Guild Wars 2 Free to Play Weekend: http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/38


• The Enchanted Forest: http://www.enchantedforest.com/


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.O.B.


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4


• http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/meet-xbox-one


• Apple TV App Store: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/08/18/there-could-still-be-a-november-surprise-for-apple-tv/


• Steam Box Piston Pre-orders: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416457,00.asp

What do you think about current and next gen consoles? Do you have a Wii U? Are you going to pickup a PS4 at launch?

Just watched an awesome fan video called "Link to the Future." It starts off as a pretty reasonable Zelda fan film and then Doc. Brown shows up with a DeLorean. You heard me, now watch it, watch it now.

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEVdWlNCUkg

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvk5L3wjRo0

Behind the scenes+more info on how they were made:
http://www.the3gi.com/linktothefuture.htm

I heard about Analgesic Production's first game Anodyne when it hit the Pirate Bay. When it made it to the popular Torrent site they dropped the price of the game to help promote it and the story of what happened broke in the gaming community. I picked up the Anodyne game+score bundle during the Pirate Bay promotion.

Anodyne is a fantastic game that really immersed me in its landscape and gameplay. To this day when I listen to the score on my iPhone I am immediately transported back into the game and its a really magical experience. When I read on Twitter that Sean and Jon of Analgesic Productions were working on a new game and it was taking shape I contacted them. Even The Ocean is looking to be a really interesting game and I look forward to checking it out at PAX.

This interview contains a spoiler to Star Trek Into Darkness.

jdodson: I wonder if you could explain a bit about Even The Ocean. How is turning out?

Sean: I think it's coming along nicely. We've had this core mechanic of managing energy (rather than insta-death or health) ready pretty early on, and recently we've been figuring out the best ways to sort of express that through the worlds in EtO...how best to pace the game, etc. The past 5 months, when I get time to work on EtO, has been a mix of level design, infrastructure programming (to handle a game of EtO's scale), planning out world/story/game design with Jon, and music. And I guess a little bit of marketing. I expect work to go faster after PAX - this summer I've been doing things with Anodyne iOS and Japanese Anodyne, plus I've been travelling a bit so it's been harder to hit a good workflow. Jon was able to start working in July, so things have been more motivating since there's been art! Overall, creating EtO is a very challenging thing from a design standpoint - while it does retain platformer traits, there's a lot of open questions as to how we design the rest. So hopefully things turn out okay!

jdodson: Anodyne is an awesome game that features a very ethereal story that wasn’t entirely straightforward. Will Even The Ocean follow suit or will it approach things differently?

Jon: We're still figuring out how the narrative will be structured. What we do know is that it will follow two separate characters, Even and Aliph. Even is a person living in a modern-day city (not fantasy, but fictitious). Aliph is a sort of dream avatar of Even who exists in a fantasy world that is more focused on strange natural terrain. The story will have a bit more of a plot than Anodyne, but that will still probably be pretty loose. There will hopefully be more context for being able to interpret the storylines based on the parallels between the two main characters.

Sean: I think something we are interested in doing is trying to step the coherence of the narrative up one level...there's a unique set of challenges to designing a world with little explicit narrative interference (like Anodyne), and there's another set of challenges when designing interacting worlds with a moderate amount of narrative interference.

jdodson: It looks like Even the Ocean will take the player between a dream world and an urban setting. Anodyne had these elements too and I am curious if these games are spiritually linked together in some way?

Sean: I think they are linked in that they are both looking at characteristics of a person in an abstracted way. Like you can observe what someone is feeling or thinking by giving them dialogue or interactions with other things, in some fictional reality. But you can also try to do something similar by giving a character some set of game mechanics and letting them go into a designed world, and see what you can learn about a character through that, which is what Anodyne tried to do. EtO is trying a similar thing, but we are using the world of Even and world of Aliph as a contrast.

jdodson: Will Young or any other character from Anodyne make an appearance?

Jon: Hmm, we haven't really talked about this! Knowing us, almost definitely yes, but who knows how or in what context!

jdodson: One element of Even The Ocean is that the dream world and real world will be visually different. This is a very unique idea and I am curious if these differences will relate to the gameplay itself?

Jon: Yes, Even's world will not really have platforming/actiony gameplay in the way that Aliph's world does (it won't be a parkour game!). Those areas will be more RPG-esque in that they will mostly consist of walking around and talking to people. I'm still working out the visual styles though, so I've yet to see even how those will interact.

jdodson: Can you explain a bit about the main character Aliph and how she fits in with the world you are building?

Sean: Aliph is a repairperson for these power plants in their fictional world - and Aliph's role evolves a bit throughout the game...not to a hero, but more of an observer/investigator to their world and why it is the way it is and why it is changing. Aliph's events roughly kind of explore a similar idea to what Even experiences in the looks into Even's life, though I don't have any direct interactions planned, where like - Even gets really mad or something, and then there's a fire in Aliph's world, or whatever.

jdodson: Anodyne used Adobe Air as the language and framework you used to knit the game together. Are you using this stack for Even The Ocean or are you using something different this time?

Sean: The things that have changed are the language, framework, and level editor. I'm coding in HaXe 3 now, using a HaXeFlixel + OpenFL stack, and the level editor is in-game, though we still use DAME for almost-final tiling passes. I changed because I liked the open-ness of HaXe a lot more, and I think it is going nice places, and it also compiles down to CPP, so perhaps that makes something like porting EtO to PS4 or whatever more feasible.

jdodson: Even The Ocean is still in its early stages but I am curious if you guys have a rough timeline for a beta and launch?

Sean: None at all! Well, I'd like to finish things up before GDC next year. We might do a public (or press/friends-only) demo sometime after PAX, and we'll probably have a set of testers before launch. I'm not sure when that would be. I feel like things are going to progress faster than they have after PAX, since I won't have Anodyne stuff to do, and I'll be more settled in to where I did most of the Anodyne dev. There are narrative things to figure out and some design things, but I think things will progress faster once we figure those out. I have a sense of scale for the game, it is slightly larger than Anodyne, but we did most of Anodyne's content in a 6 month period with work and full-time school. So I think we will be able to finish more now that we are doing games full time. Or maybe not!

!!The following question contains Star Trek into Darkness spoilers!!

jdodson: In the new film Star Trek Into Darkness we find out that the Khan’s blood has magical powers that can bring people back to life. This is used to bring back Captain Kirk and a Tribble. I am curious if a universe where one can magically inject oneself with “bring me back to life juice” is one where the threat of death is real. In the end doesn’t this drop any kind of tension because now and in the future any major character can simply be revived?

Jon: Yeah there were a lot of things that felt sort of narratively broken about that film. Magic revive blood definitely breaks the universe. Plus, weren't Khan and his family engineered? That means someone basically already invented the stuff. Also the female characters in that movie were pretty poorly written. There were fun parts to it though, I suppose.

Sean: I haven't seen it, but I feel like humans (or sentient beings) would figure out something to get all pissy about even if we couldn't die. Like life partners, or varying quality of lives, choosing whether or not to revive yourself...etc.

jdodson: Many Indie games use Kickstarter to help fund their next games, including some bigger studios like Double Fine. Is this something you have considered for Even The Ocean?

Jon: No, we are fortunate enough to not really need the money right now. And I wouldn't like the stress of all the backers and rewards. There's enough stress as it is, just getting stuff done day-to-day without thousands of people already having paid for what you're making.

Sean: It would be a pain in the ass. I guess if something horrible happened and we were REALLY close to finishing but running out of money then I might do it as a way to get "pre-order" money. But I wouldn't offer rewards or anything. Dunno.

jdodson: After school are you considering doing game development full time?

Jon: We both just graduated this past spring and we are now doing game dev full time :D

Sean: Yeah, for the near future it is going to be what I do most of the time, though of course, who knows what will be happening in a year or two.. No school also opens up time to pursue other hobbies, so that will be interesting as well!

jdodson: You guys will be at PAX Prime at the Indie Mega Booth. Anything we can look forward to when we stop by to check it out?

Jon: We'll be giving away buttons that I made featuring Young, Miao Xiao Tuan Er, and the protagonists of Even the Ocean. Also we're shooting to have some playable demo of Even the Ocean to show.

Sean: We'll also be showing Anodyne, mentioning the upcoming Japan release on Sep 4th. And our awesome localizers, Kakehashi Games - http://www.kakehashigames.com/ .


jdodson: I wanted to thank you guys for talking to me about your new game and I wish you well. Is there anything you want to say before we finish up?

Jon: Thanks for your interest! Keep on spreading positive energy in the internet video game community!

Sean: Thanks for the interview!!! Looking forward to see you.

http://www.eventheocean.com/
http://seagaia.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/anodyne-pirate-bay-promo-post-mortem/

New Starcrafts video highlighting the Zerg Larva being somewhat OP. At least, on the creep. :D

Creepy new trailer released with news of The Binding of Issac Rebirth launching on Steam in 2014. The trailer is creepy, strange and neat all in one.

Starcraft Universe is a new fan created Starcraft II map that is essentially a Starcraft MMO. Blizzard highlights the new mod in a recent blog post and video tear down giving us all more reasons to play Stacraft 2 again.

http://us.battle.net//sc2/en/blog/8996231#best

PC Gamer creates a list of the top 25 shooters of all time. Unreal Tournament, BioShock, Wolfenstein, Counter-strike, Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands 2, Doom, Quake III & Half-life 2 all make the list and one spot they gave to Team Fortress 2.

http://www.pcgamer.com/gallery/the-best-shooters-of-all-time/

"Delve deeper into the world of Destiny with the Bungie team to discover more ways to become legend on this new adventure."

Destiny looks beautiful and this documentary shows off how much time and polish Bungie has been spending on it. I am interested to see how the on the fly co-op works in the game as well as experience the lush visuals first hand.

In a world of impossibly difficult rogue-likes FTL ups the challenge but dares to be fun and unique. One large element in the mixture of FTL's awesomery is the score. From the opening track of Ben Prunty's "Space Cruise" to the more etherial "Engi," the score is important to building the overall feel of an open and lonely universe. I picked up an FTL bundle on Steam that included the score and was impressed with Ben's work.

I contacted Ben and he was kind enough to answer some questions I had about FTL and the other stuff he is up to right now. He just launched a pre-order for his new album "Curious Merchandise" and has two preview tracks "Fractal Wheel" and "Swamp Witch" available to stream on Bandcamp.

http://benprunty.bandcamp.com/album/curious-merchandise

jdodson: When you look back at your work on FTL now, what comes to mind? Anything you might approach differently?

Ben Prunty: I might not have had so many hi-hats in all the battle tracks. Seriously, they're everywhere! Other than that, I'm pretty satisfied with how it came out.

CapnCurry: The first time I played FTL, I noticed the title music was kind of lonely and maybe a little regretful. I was intrigued, because I was expecting more of a hero's-fanfare, never-tell-me-the-odds kind of overture. Having played through FTL a few (hundred) times, I have to say the music is strikingly appropriate to the tone of the game itself -- when I start a new game, the title music is almost a reminder that I'm almost definitely going to die alone in space. Can you tell us a little about how you came to select that musical direction for the title music?

Ben Prunty: I was asked to have something at least vaguely chiptune-esque and not overly dramatic. I'm a fan of space horror more than space opera, and there's already plenty of bombastic sci-fi music out there. I decided right from the start that FTL would sound cinematic but without an orchestra. I thought this would help make it distinctive. Space is creepy and lonely, and there's nothing particularly bombastic about suffocating to death on your own ship. So I really tried to convey that. I think you can hear that most in Void, Deepspace, Debris, Wasteland, and Engi.

jdodson: The FTL score clocks in at 1.5 hours. When you were talking with Matthew and Justin did they give you an outline of how much music they wanted? Did you get any other cues to work off for the game in terms of direction they wanted you to take?

Ben Prunty: The amount of music needed was more a mutual decision after a lot of discussion. The only other direction I got from them was "We really like the music from Battlestar Galactica."

jdodson: What other composers do you look at as doing great work? Any video game composers come to mind?

Ben Prunty: My favorite game soundtrack is from EarthBound, written by Keiichi Suzuki. For FTL I was listening to funk music, Gustav Holst, and chiptunes. Right now I'm obsessed with Empire of the Sun's new(ish) album and John Williams music for the Indiana Jones movies. He weaves so many different themes together, which is similar to what I tried to do with FTL.

CapnCurry: Did you play the finished game before you wrote the score, or did you have less-complete materials to work with?

Ben Prunty: I had the great privilege of playing a build of the game that was very far along before I had to write anything. I joined the project about a year into its development.

jdodson: One of the unique aspects of the FTL score for me is the battle music. Most battle music is somewhat jarring and fierce. The FTL score battle queues don’t follow this tradition and instead focus more on darker tones and occasionally quicker tempos. When you were creating the battle queues I wonder what your plan was?

Ben Prunty: I just wanted battles to sound exciting. Something to get your pulse going. An extreme generalization would be that the Battle versions of tracks are simply the Explore track with percussion added. The most basic example is Colonial: same track but with drums. On the other end of the spectrum, Cosmos Battle is pretty much an entirely different track from Cosmos Explore. And then throughout the soundtrack there are many shades of difference in between. Try arranging arranging a playlist where the Battle tracks come right after their respective Explore tracks and you'll get a good idea of how it works.

Jarring and fierce works for a 2-hour movie but not for a game that you'll be playing for 30 hours or more.

jdodson: What would you suggest to people that want to break into scoring video game music?

Ben Prunty: Keep making music constantly and go out and meet people! Find where game developers are and where they gather and crash those parties! Also be ready for this to take a long time. I started making music in 2000, when I was 17. Since then it's been 13 years of practice and work and many canceled projects. I made almost no money from my music during that time. It's discouraging when you find that no one cares about your music, but you just need to keep at it.

jdodson: What projects are you working on right now?

Ben Prunty: Here are some soundtracks I'm working on, with links! Gravity Ghost with Erin Robinson. Scale with Steve Swink. A secret project with Robot Invader. Another super secret thing that I can't tell you about. I just put up a new album for pre-order called Curious Merchandise. It's similar to Chromatic T-Rex. Unlike T-Rex though, it has many tracks written specifically for the album.

http://gravityghost.com/
http://www.steveswink.com/news/scale-is-a-game/
http://robotinvader.com/
http://benprunty.bandcamp.com/album/curious-merchandise
http://benprunty.bandcamp.com/album/chromatic-t-rex

jdodson: I just checked out the preview track from Fractal Wheel from Curious Merchandise, I really like it. How did you approach this album and how do you consider it in terms of your other video game scores?

Ben Prunty: Thanks! I had been wanting to make another compilation album like Chromatic T-Rex, but I didn't quite have enough material to make one. I had this other album in mind that didn't quite get off the ground. The individual tracks sounded great, but they weren't forming the cohesive whole that I had in mind when I started. Ghost Jazz, Fractal Wheel, Gleaming Copper, One Lifetime, Canister Perplexing and Tribal Crisis were all reconstituted from this unfinished album and made to fit with the rest of the random stuff I put together for Curious Merchandise. The result, I think, works pretty well.

jdodson: Do the songs Curious Merchandise follow any particular themes or concept?

Ben Prunty: One of my favorite albums of all time is William Orbit's Strange Cargo. In fact, the whole Strange Cargo series is fantastic. They really influenced my style. Those albums are a real eclectic mix of electronic and acoustic instrumentals and ambiances. Every track in each album feels like it is part of something much larger, like it's part of a soundtrack to some forgotten movie. I tried to recreate that feel with Curious Merchandise, and even the title is a reference to Strange Cargo. The title of each track was carefully chosen to evoke imagery and help drive home that feeling of belonging to something big and mysterious. That's why the album cover is a creepy pawnshop. Shout out to Beau Blyth (teknopants.com) for the fantastic art.

jdodson: What was the first album you ever owned?

Ben Prunty: I think that would've been Weird Al's In 3D. On cassette tape. But let's get a little more pertinent. I think the first thing I bought was a 2-disc compilation album of really mediocre German trance called "World of Trance Vol. 2". I loved it and would listen to it every night for 2 or 3 hours before going to sleep. I was probably 14 at the time. It's long out of print now, but if you're really curious, I believe the record label was called ZYX. I also used to hold up a tape recorder to the TV's or PC's speakers and record game music to listen to later. Listening to game music is so much easier now than it was 20 years ago.

jdodson: As video has moved from VHS to DVD to High Definition with BluRay and makes its way to ultra HD 4k I wonder why we don’t see the same movement in music audio? For the most part it seems that music has peaked at CD quality Stereo with the rare album release on 5.1 on DVD or BluRay. There has also been a kind of resurgence in vinyl as a music format as some prefer its analog nature to more modern digital formats. Why do you think video keeps reaching at the higher quality formats while audio seems to have stagnated or regressed somewhat?

Ben Prunty: I honestly don't care much about sound quality, and I don't think I'm alone. CD quality is pretty great. If the music sounds great to you, why should the format matter? Chuck Berry's old recordings are going to sound the same coming from a CD or a Blu-Ray, and so is FTL. The FTL soundtrack on Steam is only available as 256kbps mp3s. I've sold thousands of copies and not one person has complained about it being on an "inferior" format.

jdodson: I honestly can't tell the difference between a 256k mp3 rip myself either and it seems music quality is "good enough." I don't mean that in a negative way, things really do sound great. That said, I do prefer to buy a CD now and then and am curious if you have considered a physical release of your music?

Ben Prunty: I've considered it, but really there's just not enough demand to justify the cost of printing the discs, which would have to come out of my pocket. I've had maybe 5 or 6 requests for a physical copy total. I thought there'd be more, but there you have it. If I could give people a really good reason to buy the physical copy over digital, like extra tracks and cool artwork, then I might do it.

jdodson: When you sit down to score how do you have an idea of the kinds of themes you want to create or is it a somewhat emergent process?

Ben Prunty: For FTL and Gravity Ghost it was definitely an emergent process, but now that I've done more than a few complete soundtracks, I'm pretty good at coming up with at least one theme right from the start, and then working towards adding a second or third later. So I guess that's a combination of directed and emergent.

jdodson: For the new game projects you are working on now how different are they in terms of direction and style?

Ben Prunty: The secret project with Robot Invader is a completely different style. Not a chiptune in sight. It's been really fun and liberating. Scale is actually still really early and I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. And I still don't know how to classify Gravity Ghost.

jdodson: I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today, is there anything you want to save before we finish up?

Ben Prunty: I want to thank FTL fans for changing my life. I live in financial comfort now thanks to them. You guys are the best!

http://benprunty.com/

How long could peace in Sanctuary last after Diablo III? Apparently not too long as it turns out. Interested in a new D3 expansion but I am somewhat put off by some of the cinematic. To keep this post spoiler free i'll put my thoughts on it in the comments.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/reaper-of-souls/

UPDATE: I am collecting all the news bits of the expansion in the comments section and so far have collected some really interesting information about the new Crusader Class and the new "loot run" game mode. This expansion is starting to shape up to be very interesting.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is what I have been playing since it was launched last week. It's free to play and available on iPhone and iPad and I seriously recommend you play it.

this game is challenging

One of my biggest complaints with the original Plants vs. Zombies was that it was a bit too easy. If you figured out a pretty good build you could use that all the way to the end without much change required. You would get new plants and often it made sense to chose a new one over an old one, but often times you could use the same build all the way to end.

PvZ 2 is much more challenging and I love it. I've lost a few matches already and have had to adapt my strategy to win. Certain missions have you accomplish certain tasks, like protect a particular plant, only play with a certain plant build or start the game with a fixed amount of sun and stand your ground. I love the new play modes and how hard they are and have spent all my time unlocking each level and beating it one at a time.

free to play isn't annoying or hamfisted

One of the elements of Plants vs. Zombies 2 I was very nervous about was the free to play element. I was worried EA would dump out a stupid Facebook game or game very similar to the mobile free to play crapware. So far, my fears are entirely unfounded as the free to play element is present but not required to win or have fun. If you want, you can buy gold to toss on power ups or boosts and unlock plants. Or you could just go through each mission and unlock them yourself.

crazy dave and time machine are fun

I really like that they brought back Crazy Dave from the first game. They introduced a new character in a sentient time machine that not only serves to take you back in time but also a sort of NPC that propels you through the stories and levels. For some reason the time periods you go back to have Zombie infestations and they game doesn't quite explain why but it doesn't matter, the Zombies need killin'.

I am really interested to how this game evolves over time. It seems EA set up PvZ 2 as a game that can be updated with new levels after launch and I hope this gives PvZ a long life. I happily paid for the original Plants vs. Zombies on my PC and later my iPhone because it was so much fun. I kind of feel bad that I am getting so much enjoyment from PvZ 2 and it hasn't cost me a dime yet. If I make it to the end of the game and haven't purchased anything I may just do it to sort of vote for the game with my wallet.

All that said, Plants vs. Zombies 2 is well worth your time and available for the ridiculously low price of free.