Deadplants: Replay/Chapter 1: Gameplay

This is my first time really writing these out, so bare with me if I sound a little crazy or far fetched. I'm not honestly sure what happened even happened to begin with. My name's Nicole, 19 turning 20 soon, and I've recently remembered an old DS cartridge I was given to by an old friend.

This all started when I was 11-12 or something, don't remember. But, I do remember for the longest time, I had no real way to play Plants Vs. Zombies, so I begged a friend of mine if they could buy it for me. They were on a richer side of the old town I used to live in and he said he could try to find it or something; A week later, I got what I asked for. Plants Vs. Zombies for the DS, a perfectly normal abet aged case with the game intact and looking brand new. He said “should be thankful that he found it so cheap." and trust me I was. I wish I still could've replayed him for going all out to get this, I hear he's still in my old neighborhood; I should really visit.But besides that, as soon as I was able, I rushed home and ran right up to my bedroom, dimmed my lights and popped the game right into the system. It didn't read at first but that was mostly because my DS at the time was really old, couldn't afford to get the brand new 3DS at the time. I just blew into the port to clean it out and as soon as I put the game back in, it was ready to be played. And clicking that button to open the game right on up never felt so exciting… I binged the game throughout the rest of the evening and through the night, and what felt like yesterday turned into a couple of weeks as I played that game nonstop! Collecting the plants, getting to play minigames, right through the morning to the night, the pool to the rooftops, I mastered that game right away; it felt like it was meant for me! After beating the game's story mode I decided to check out some of the 'more' minigames, those were also really fun! I loved playing as the zombies for a change, I honestly wish they made a spinoff where you could play as the zombies getting to the plants that aren't just the new Garden Warfare coming out around the time, eugh.

Things were fun around the time and like anyone else I grew bored of replaying the adventure mode over and over; and I decided to let the game rest for some time. Time flies huh because I don't recall picking that game back up till I was like, 14! That's two whole years! Hanging out with friends and studying for work really makes time go by quicker than you'd think it does. Around the time I was getting back into PvZ, checking out the second installment and even daring myself to try out Garden Warfare. It was all really nostalgic and weird to see my favorite game in different faces, but if I really wanted to experience true Plants Vs. Zombies, I knew what I had to do.

My DS was super crappy, and about on its last legs at the time so I couldn't play my favorite game on that, but thankfully I had another buddy of mine, Arthur, hook me up with a emulator and a way to port my saved PvZ data from my DS copy to it, so I was able to replay the original pixel art style I was familiar with! It was all there with my name and everything, unchanged...Or, well, so I thought.

I remember hearing Arthur talk about someone who played a hacked ROM of PvZ that was called "Deadplants" or something, saying the plants looked decayed and things were really weird, if not undead. I shrugged it off because why would a cute little tower defense game have such creepy imagery in it? Sure the game over screen a bit off putting for new players but seriously! Popcap would NEVER do something like that, right? Honestly, I'm not sure myself after what happened and I'm still debating if it was all a dream or not, if anything I'll probably let whoever finds this and reads it decide.

Arthur told me more about the guy, saying he had a setup of Peashooters, both Sunflower and Twin Sunflower, Magnet Shrooms, Coffee Beans, yada yada honestly I would have cared less but for the fun of it I picked those plants alongside some other useful plants first for my first few new runs in the game; it sounded like a weird but useful strategy. He also told me about how the zombies wouldn't even show up during a few waves, and whenever they did they were a lot more hostile than before. Which sounded like a load of bull because they showed up right away and were easy per usual. Nothing was acting weird and the game was playing pretty normal! That's till, the actual weird stuff went on…

Playing further into the beginning of the game I still had my starting setup from before, and after I beat 1-9 I was really hyped to get to 1-10 to plow through the endless hoard with the plants the game would slip to me. But, instead of the game instantly throwing me through the boss wave...The level just started. I honestly couldn't believe it but at first when I saw what was going on I felt the stupid ROM rumor seriously can't be coming true; but at the same time I had this, weird dread that I felt like something was about to happen, something I didn't know if I could control. Right there the game decided to just throw me in with the eight plants I always used for the laughs like they expected me to survive with them. I was confused, this didn't happen in the original! Why was it just throwing me into the fray with old ammo?? What made it worse was they didn't even show me what was coming so I had little strategy to work on, I did what I could do and just tried to build off of rows of what I think would work, blind to see what would be coming. I noticed that the time the zombies took to get here was also really slow, felt like a crawl once I heard the notification that they was on the way, it didn't help that the sun production outside of my Sunflowers was super slow too, like the sun itself was bled dry of any substance to work off of. From there the game felt normal, just some normal zombies starting to trudge and walk their way over. I felt ready for them, I handled these guys before, I was prepared to make them eat the dust! The level played normally, which I was thankful for because if the zombies where actually as ruthless as they was in the dumb story I heard Arthur go on about, I would've been actually worried, haha. As you can see in the screenshots I took here, the battle against the zombies was quite fun.

I beat through the day levels and into the night levels. Same old good days when I played it. Man, those memories kept coming back to me. Going so well to this cute game. Night levels where actually back to normal, letting me pick out my plants and use them against the undead horde; I loved using the Doomshroom's because they blew up EVERYTHING on screen and it was just so fun to watch all those zombies smolder into dust after using the Iceshroom to freeze them in place. It felt sick and twisted but they were out for my brains so I couldn't let them get to them so easily.

I wish I could’ve got some screenshots but I was more focused on the game at the time, nothing weird was going on so I didn’t feel the screens were really needed. From here on though, I made sure I got screenshots of everything that came next. Especially a screen I didn’t expect a game like this to have... Hills? PvZ never had a ‘Hills’ level, in fact Plants Vs. Zombies never introduced levels like this! They simply dropped you in with Crazy Dave, a character I always found funny, to tell you the basic sum-up of what you do here and what the new gimmick is. At this point, I felt- no, KNEW something was wrong, and I feel like an idiot for not clicking out sooner. Curiosity setup it’s mousetrap, and I took the bait.