Plants vs Zombies - Making Money The Easy Way

Do you have a desire for great wealth? A shining golden house? A personal aquarium? A corn-on-the-cob rocket launcher?

Even as I write this blog, I am earning money to pay off Crazy Dave and get myself these fine accessories. How am I doing it? Well I'm here to tell you.

First of all, let's be clear that I'm talking about Plants vs. Zombies, a PopCap game that was originally released on the PC and then ported to the XBox 360. It's a excellent tower defense game for the casual gamer, where you try to keep zombies from eating your brains with a set of dangerous, possibly alien plants.

I've seen a few cheats that let you make massive amounts of money on the PC, but few for the XBox version of the game. Since some of the Achievements require tons of cash, I thought I'd share my method here.

Step 1: Beat Adventure Mode. You need access to the Zen Garden for this to work.
Step 2: Plant a square of 9 Marigolds in your garden. You'll need to grow these to full size. If you play through the puzzle mode levels, you shouldn't have any trouble getting enough money for this step, even if you spent all of your Adventure Mode loot.
Step 3: Tend to your plants until you've spritzed all nine of them with the Bug Spray. This will keep the plants happy for a full day. (You may have to use the Phonograph instead, but this can be expensive.)
Step 4: Place your cursor over top of the center Marigold in your square of nine.
Step 5: Walk away! The happy Marigolds will generate coins for a full day. Because of the way the XBox version of the cursor works, the coins will be sucked directly into your wallet.

There are many quicker ways to earn money, but few of them allow you to simply walk away from your console while your plants do the work for you. I've already racked up $3,000+ in a few hours today, without having to burn my whole afternoon playing the game.

If anyone has a better strategy for the XBox version, feel free to share in the comments! If I get a really good one, I'll post a picture of myself cosplaying as Crazy Dave. Grabble-abble!

A Little Bit of Luck

Last night I got hit with a nasty case of TMJ. This is a condition where the joints in your jaw are chronically inflamed. Mostly it causes an achy jaw, but sometimes it can result in a nasty headache. Last night, in my case, it gave me a headache and a really nasty neckache. I ended up lying in bed for hours, twisting around and trying to get comfortable when it felt like I had a nest of cobras twisting around in my neck. In the end I didn't get to sleep until 3 in the morning. I'd already been coping with a cough over the weekend, so when I got up this morning (at 6a.m.), I decided I'd be better off calling in sick than trying to play Office Zombie.

Here's the good part (for me, at least). A water main broke near my office this morning and shut the whole place down for the day. So thanks to the worst headache and neckache I've had in my life, I managed to dodge a two-hour commute that would have been a complete fiasco. I didn't have to use sick leave, and I spent the downtime freeing my mom and sister's wireless connection from interloping freeloaders. Overall it was a pretty good day; one that easily could have been a lousy one, and was for a lot of people. Best wishes and safe home to all of them.

Links of Interest

I'm feeling lazy tonight, so instead of generating content I'm going to pass along some awesome stuff from other places. (Well, there will be some content.)

Smellovision is coming to a television near you. The new ScentScape device emits a set of 20 preset scents to accompany video games. Said scents can be programmed into video games using a Scent Editor. Now when you kill a guy in Halo, you can smell the blood! I don't know if blood is a scent.

A superintelligent blimp will be floating above Afghanistan starting this fall. Luckily the "Blue Devil" program will not be arming this latest iteration of SkyNet.

Optogeneticists have developed a means to manipulate minds using a combination of light and genetic engineering. So far the technique is limited to small organisms, such as worms and fruit flies. Henry Pym is preparing a patent lawsuit as we speak.

Soldiers are beta-testing voice translation smart phones. Yes, we will be seeing a universal translator at some point in our lifetimes.

Since this is supposed to be a writing blog... Chris Baty has eight tips for revising a novel. Or if you prefer short fiction, there's a competition open until February 14th you can enter.

Last but not least, Red Letter Media has a lengthy but hilarious review of Revenge of the Sith. I consider this a must-watch piece of web video.

Power Outage

Some people would use that as a metaphor for missing a blog post. Not me, I really had one tonight. It's sleeting outside, which is a great way to screw up power lines and morning commutes; something to look forward to in the morning as I skid my way down a 30 degree incline onto the road out of our neighborhood...

But I digress. The lights went out about half an hour before Sarah went to bed. In that period we hunted for light sources (successfully; Yankee Candle is Sarah's new best friend, and my Kindle reading light is surprisingly useful as a deployable turret), listened to the neighbors chop firewood and yell a bit, and comforted the dog, who took to stuffing herself into corners and trembling like a very scared thing.

I haz The Fear.

Luckily our power company managed to restore service in about an hour and a half, so I'm able to pry Lina off my leg and blog a bit before going to bed at my usual time: Too Damn Late.

I did end up seeing Black Swan this Saturday, and I'll say right now that Natalie Portman earned the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and as far as I'm concerned she's earned herself an Oscar as well. Her performance was inspired and terrifying, in a movie that was also inspired and terrifying. If you're at all engaged in a creative endeavor, go see Black Swan.

Things That Happened This Week

Despite a series of plagues that hit the Earle household this week, it's been pretty busy. Some items of interest:

My three submissions for the forthcoming anthology, Treacheries of the Space Marines, were all rejected this week. This was not entirely unexpected: one pitch was a bit vague on plot and not quite on target for the book's theme; one I was half hoping would get rejected because I've developed other plans for its protagonists; and the one I liked most would have played havoc with a bunch of other Black Library authors if it got published. Lessons learned:

• Thoroughly polish every submission before you send it in. Yes, the submissions window came up on short notice, but I might have been better off putting some extra work in to my stories and waiting for the next go-round to submit.
• Think about salability. This doesn't mean writing with sales figures in mind, or trying to piggyback of a trend. If you're writing in somebody else's universe, though, you should do your best not to write anything that breaks the universe, no matter how good a story it makes. I've done this twice, once because I'm a damn fool and once because I couldn't resist. No mas!
• Always be patient when waiting on a response. Editors celebrate the holidays too. (I was actually good about this one - not even a hint of nervousness.)

And so much for that. This week I also got inspired to restart an older project, my first completed NaNoNovel from 2008. The draft I wrote during NaNoWriMo is probably beyond redemption, but I've been unable to get the basic story ideas out of my head for three years, now. So I'm going to try again, but this I'm going to try plotting the thing, rather than frantically scrambling for words. So far it's going well.

The oven situation in our house has, happily, been resolved. I got to learn how to wire a new heating element into an oven after our old one broke (read: blew a hole in itself, caught on fire and spilled white powder all over the bottom of the oven). This also involved learning other things, such as how to remove an oven door for easy access and how my toolbox doesn't (didn't) have a quarter inch hex wrench in it. We'll have a test cook of something in the next two days, and barring fire I'll mark the project down as a success.

Finally, my wife's sister is visiting and we're all going to see Black Swan tomorrow. I've heard nothing but good things, so I'm looking forward to it. I suspect watching Natalie Portman suffer a nervous breakdown on screen is going to be inspiring.