Format: Flash
Developer: PopCap Games
www.popcap.com/games/free/pvz

With a name that suggests it might be some manner of space trumpet, and a cultural footprint that includes a handful of cameos in Peanuts strips, the Zamboni belongs near the apex of mankind’s achievements.

Rumbling towards its sixtieth birthday, the humble ice-resurfacing device remains an obscurity in Europe, relegated to Trivial Pursuit questions and season finales of Top Gear. In America, however, it’s a full-blown cultural titan. Like a burgeoning methadone habit or a brief engagement to Winona Ryder, being asked to drive the pre-match Zamboni for the local hockey team is an almost certain indicator that you’ve finally reached the hallowed chambers of the celebrity elite – an honour, you suspect, that even the sanest of men might ultimately kill for.
 
I love Zambonis, and I always have: finally coming face-to-grill with one at Donald Trump’s Central Park ice rink last year proved to be an extremely emotional moment, and the only reason I don’t use one to get around town on a permanent basis is because they’re probably quite difficult to manoeuvre around a Waitrose car park. I sense someone at PopCap loves them just as much as I do, however. The juddery appearance of Frank Zamboni’s dream machine in Plants Vs Zombies, the company’s brilliant tower defence game that somehow manages to blend the body horror of Silent Hill with the bucolic preoccupations of Harvest Moon, will likely go down in history as one of the high points of twenty-first century gaming.

I’ll leave it to you to discover if the Zomboni makes an appearance in this week’s staggeringly generous Flash version, but it hardly matters: if there’s going to be a better game than Plants Vs Zombies released this year, it had better hurry up. Sure, I’ve enjoyed flapping around the grim institutional brickwork of Arkham Asylum, or picking my way through the strangely Milton Keynsian streets of ODST’s New Mombasa, but these delights inevitably come mixed with irritations, whether it’s Rocksteady’s occasionally anachronistic boss fights, or the temperamental checkpoints and fiddly interior sections of Bungie’s latest. Plants, however, almost never frustrates, and its newest incarnation, stripped down to an entirely reasonable three modes and fourteen levels, is a cause for celebration.

As with most of the company’s games, Plants works its magic by thrusting you into a coherent, consistent world built in equal parts from immediate pleasures and long-term discoveries. It wastes little time in sweeping you along with its frighteningly efficient learning curve, each stage filled with carefully co-ordinated ebbs and flows, but the deeper rewards only become apparent once hours have passed, as you push your strategies to their dangerous outer limits – deciding to use only two of your available seed slots, perhaps, and fighting off the next wave of undead with the seemingly useless combination of Wall-Nuts and Potato Mines alone.

All of which would be charming enough by itself, but there’s something else about the free version of Plants Vs Zombies that makes it particularly heartwarming. With its generosity and structural polish, this feels a little too elaborate to be classified as a mere demo - even though that’s presumably exactly what it is. Instead, advertising interruptions aside, it feels like a gift, a piece of level-headed kindness built around the reasoning that giving you enough of something good might make you want more of it. As we lurch towards a Christmas heavy with peripherals and special editions, it’s a relief to know that one company, at least, believes that you can still trust a decent game to sell itself with little gimmicky arm-bending involved. PopCap is still willing to hedge its future on quality rather than novelty.

So maybe you don’t need to play the most recent iteration of Plants Vs Zombies – it was already delightful and ingenious in its original form. Maybe you don’t need to play it even though  it’s inarguably the best free web game you’ll come across this week. Maybe you should play it because it’s a reminder that PopCap’s betting on its future with simple and bold forward thinking.