Stomping Zombies in Vasebreaker Endless

Lots of games are fun but have limited strategy.  Most of Plants vs. Zombies is one of these games.  The good thing about the game though is that there are so many mini-games to choose from.  And one of those mini-games turns out to have a decent amount of strategy.  Anyhoo, here's how to stomp zombies at Vasebreaker Endless.

You start here.  Your house, unseen is to the left of the screen.  If the zombies get there, you eat shit.

The brown vases are filled with either (1) zombies or (2) shit to help you kill zombies.

So how to begin?  One strategy that I started with was to open one vase at a time.  This strategy turns out to suck.  It sucks because you need to know where to make your optimal placement of plants.  You only know that if you open a bunch of vases to start with in order to see which rows will pose the biggest challenge.

So open the first two rows on the right.

What you see are zombies and shit to kill zombies.  When you open a zombie vase, that fucker just starts walking toward your house.  They are all generally pretty slow, however.

In addition to the zombies, you see five cards with pictures of plants on them.  Now it is your turn to grab those cards and place them wherever you want.  The three green plants in this picture are all "repeaters"--they shoot two pellets at a time, and they shoot toward the left of the screen.  The two blue ones are pretty awesome.  They are ice plants, and they shoot toward the right of the screen.  Anything an ice plant shoots instantly slows way the fuck down.  Very nice weapon to use against the gargantuan zombie, which we haven't uncovered yet.

This is part of a standard setup of mine, with ice plants on top and bottom.  (You only get two.)

The regular-looking zombies in the bottom row die after 10 hits.  The bucketheads in the three middle rows, however, need 65 hits to die.  One repeater will not kill these guys.

Well, things have changed.  We now have a zombie nearly exiting to the left.  However, you'll notice that he's lost a forearm.  That means he's 5 hits or less away from death.  The real worry are the two bucketheads in the upper row.  I've placed a rock in front of them.  (You get one rock per level.)  In this spot, you need either to place a squash (like the one in the top row, next to the ice plant) or else you can plant a mine underneath their feet (see the card in the middle row).  Both the squash and the mine kill most zombies instantly.

I placed the mine underneath their feet, hoping to blow their punk asses to Cincinnati.  The mine takes several seconds to activate, however.  In this case, the zombies ate through the rock and continued their journey before the mine could activate itself.  Oops.  It's okay.  Level one is easy.  You can fuck up in all sorts of ways and still kill them all.

So I used a squash on the bucketheads.  To find a squash, I had to open several vases.  Inside one I found Gargantuan Zombie (top row).  He's the one with the midget strapped to his back.  Key with that big fucker: don't hurt him too badly until he gets past the halfway point on your screen.  Not to worry, an ice plant, a squash, and a repeater soon to be behind that zombie will do the job.

As you can see, I'm fucking him up pretty bad.  Also, from the above picture, you may deduce one of the strategies I use: clearing rows.  After the top row is cleared, I'll only have the bottom row left.  And the bottom row is already well covered--not only by the ice plant but also by two triple-shooters, plants that shoot three pellets at once, one down its own row and one down each adjacent row.

Dead gargantuan zombie.  Eat shit, fucker.  You may notice that I harbor an irrational amount of hostility toward these zombies.  I have no idea why this might be the case.

Moving right along . . . 

The goal, aside from killing everything you see, is to try to end up with one row of vases, and then to pile all of your remaining ammo on that one row, so that any zombie that pops out of a vase won't stand a chance.

The best way to start is with the vase farthest to the right.  This time around, we open a vase that reveals our most valuable weapon.  The lamp.  Once you have placed it, the lamp reveals the contents of all adjacent unopened vases.  Fucking awesome.

When we place the lamp in the row next to our vases, we see that nothing but good shit is inside.  A repeater, another plant, and finally sunlight.  Sunlight gives us energy, which we store in the upper left part of the screen.  Once we collect enough sunlight, we can use it like cash to buy cherry bombs (pictured below, upper left).

So that's it.  We killed everybody.  You just keep doing that until the program adds an extra gargantuan zombie every ten levels.  One gargantuan zombie is easy to kill, two is nothing to worry about.  But once you get to three, four, five, and six, then the shit gets hairy.

And because there is no finish line, losing is inevitable.

In any case, it's heaps more entertaining than solitaire.