Cools! was here...
I've been playing internal builds of Plants vs Zombies for about a year and a half now, and was the administrator of its beta testing. And if you ask me, Canessa did the game a real disservice saying anything about CCG's in relation to it. I literally winced when I read him saying that because I knew people would get the wrong idea.The extent of CCG influence on this game is that the plants/towers you buy are denoted by little card-like UI widgets at the top of the screen. And there's a splash of 'deckbuilding' as you get to choose 5-8 or so of your plants arsenal to use on any given level.Nobody is trying to sell booster packs for extra cash, or anything of the sort. In fact, Plants vs. Zombies is one of the best values (in terms of amount of fresh gameplay and replayability) that PopCap has ever offered. IIRC, it takes about 8 hours to beat the core game, with lots more stuff to do after that. And damn, it really is fun.I don't want to reveal too much about gameplay because I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but any enterprising souls can go dig up a screenshot from an old PC gamer. And what that screenshot will show is a grid-based game board with the player's house on the left with zombies coming from the right. Plants can be planted in the squares on the grid, and there are a number of things those plants can do: shoot zombies, act as walls, generate sun (to build more plants), light up the darkness, repel zombies, etc. IIRC there are 48 (or so) plant types to use.
