Great moments in PC gaming: Chilling in my Zen Garden in Plants Vs. Zombies

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Plants vs. Zombies is a cute game unless you really take a close look at what's happening. My melon-pult flings a watermelon across the screen where it collides with a zombie, knocking its head off. That's the body of a dead person that's just been decapitated. And it happens every few seconds! My lawn would be covered in human heads if they didn't magically disappear. Grisly.

Watching my plants get eaten by zombies is also disturbing. My poor, brave tall-nut, weeping yet still defiant as zombies rip fistfulls of nutmeat from its body and shove them into their rotting mouths. Even replacing my ragged t-nuts with new ones is a bit horrifying: I don't think I'm healing them, I think I'm euthanizing them in favor of new recruits. Monstrous.

And what happens to single-use plants like squashes and ice-shrooms when they're activated? They sacrifice themselves? Dying for the cause? This game is non-stop carnage even when you win.

So it was a true joy to progress far enough into PvZ to unlock the Zen Garden, a place where my little plants can be happy and healthy without fear of being chomped by bucketheads or squashed by zombonis or yoinked into an uncertain fate by bungie zeds.

Getting through all the levels and minigames of Plants vs. Zombies didn't take all that long, and the Zen Garden made for a nice incentive to keep going. Occasionally while replaying the campaign or seeing how far into endless survival mode I could get, a new plant seedling would drop. Oooh! I'd immediately rush to the Zen Garden and start watering it to see what it'd grow into. Cherry bomb? Scaredey-shroom? I hope it's a coffee bean, I don't have that one yet.

The little chores in the garden were pure mindless pleasure after the chaotic clicking of the main game. Just make sure every plant is watered, address their needs with items like bug spray, plant food, or by clicking them with a little phonograph that plays music to make them happy. No rush. No one dies if you don't click quickly enough. It's bliss.

Please a plant and it'll begin spitting out coins, which you can click to bank—though save up enough money and you can buy a helpful little snail to hoover up all the money, saving you a lot of mousework. The snail likes chocolate bars too, which gives you something else to collect while you're playing the main game again.

There are even separate gardens for water plants like tangle kelp and lily pads, and a nighttime garden for fungus like fume-shrooms and doom-shrooms. Every day I'd make the rounds, dispensing water and treats and watching the snail zip around collecting my cash. Then I'd play a few rounds of survival mode to hopefully collect a new seedling.

It's one of my favorite game loops ever, and I'm doing it all over again in Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted. I've already almost got a full collection of plants in my new garden. Fingers crossed I'll find a chomper the next time I play.