My wife has a problem. A few years back, she was all about PopCap games online. She’d play them for hours, and things would just get left on the wayside. She ended up giving up cold turkey one day, and things have never been better.

Then I bought Plants Vs. Zombies for my iPhone [iTunes link]. I now completely empathize.

Plants Vs. Zombies is one of those addictive games that’s difficult to put down. The premise goes that you’ve got a house with a lawn in front of it. Populate the lawn with plants with various attributes – some of them shoot, some of them provide energy to get more plants – and then wait for the zombie onslaught. Next thing you know, you’ve lost four hours of time and your fingers are cramped so bad that you can’t pick up a pencil.

With each level, things go up another notch and then another. I literally lost an hour on the game last night, all while I was trying to be productive and get things done. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an iPad version with more room for more plants and zombies. Awesome.

I love gaming on the iPhone, but not all of them translate that well to the small screen. In this case, it does so beautifully.