aurora's blog

Aurora Nguyen

If you took a specific subsection of plants -- daisies -- and headed down to the Popular Archetypes store to exchange your zombies for pirates, you'd be about 90% of the way to making a tower defense game called Pirates Love Daisies. It's that last 10%, however -- a little flash of brilliance with a soupcon of quirkiness -- that makes the game. In this case, it's HTML5; Plants Love Daisies is one of the most accomplished HTML-CSS-and-JavaScript games to date. With a truly excellent interface, it plays like a mature, latter-generation Flash game, but it retains the svelte efficiency of HTML, with barely a blip on the CPU graph.

If you've never played a tower defense game, now's your chance. Pirates Love Daisies is easy to play, family-friendly, and features a tutorial that walks you through the mechanics of the game. The visual style is nothing short of beautiful (but cute), and the soundscape is excellent. The point, though, is that Pirates Love Daisies is written in HTML5 -- and when you realize those scudding clouds, buzzing flies and droplets of rain are all being rendered by the browser, your mind blows.

That's not to say the game is without issues, though; despite looking the best in Internet Explorer 9 beta 2, it crashed multiple times (see screenshot after the break), and Firefox 4 beta 7 didn't even get past the loading screen. Firefox 4 also had significantly degraded audio, for some reason. Chrome 9 worked just fine, but seemed to use more resources than IE9.

Gallery: Pirates Love Daisies, HTML5 tower defense game