Recently on Offworld

Recently on Offworld Tom Armitage donned Plants Vs. Zombies (above) his official game for the weekend, admitting that its "charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it's never long after a play-session before you're double-clicking on it again," and I take a longer look at my first week with my own most-played tower defense game -- ngmoco and Rough Cookie's spherical iPhone Star Defense -- and how everything I was skeptical of might became the very reasons it'll win me over.

I also gave my first-hand diary account of sneaking across the digital Canadian border to be part of Microsoft's unveiling of its massively-multiplayer Xbox 360 version of the game show 1 Vs. 100, which will be played for real prizes (in the form of Microsoft Points) and looks geared to be the first successful run of a truly interactive TV show (commercial breaks and all).

Elsewhere we took a quicker look at games due out in the coming months: Konami's revival of its long-running Contra series for WiiWare, a Mr. Driller team reunion with Sony's PS3/PSP number-puzzler Qruton, and Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka's latest rhythm game for Wii, which asks that you not even hold the controller at all.

And we saw the first look at a comic-book-style SimCity game Maxis never made, the first details of BioShock 2's multiplayer campaign, listened to a live glitch-out chiptune performance and chiptunes done instead on ukuleles, and, for the daily 'one shot's: a space invader weathering a placid Paris winter, a rusted ironworks decayed arcade, and the first look at UK comics legend 2000 AD and Judge Dredd's new home on the LittleBigPlanet.