Connected's pipe-arranging puzzles are like potato chips: Bet you can't play just one.
A few weeks ago, I received e-mails from two developers within the space of about two hours. Each was pitching a new, "totally unique" puzzle game, and would I like to review them?
Now, I'm a sucker for puzzlers, especially on the iPhone, but the App Store is already teeming with them--each one claiming to be "original," "addictive," "brain-teasing," and so on. How truly unique could either of these newcomers be?
The first one, Connected, instantly reminded me of countless lay-the-pipe-before-the-water-escapes games--until I started playing it.
Connected does involve pipes, but here you're not fighting the clock (or the water). Instead, you merely have to figure out the proper arrangement of preselected pieces, which can be moved but not rotated.
It's a bit like Traffic Jam, but damn if it doesn't manage to be original, challenging, and insidiously addictive. With each level I somehow managed to complete, I told myself, "Just one more."
Add to it an elegant, simple interface and you've got 99 cents extremely well-spent.
The other game, Wriggle, also costs 99 cents--but there's a try-before-you-buy free version as well.
Great for kids but fun for anybody, Wriggle puts a great twist on block-sliding puzzles.
At first glance, Wriggle looks like a kids game--but don't let that fool you. While kids will undoubtedly enjoy the colorful, smiley-faced worms, there's plenty of challenge here for all ages.
Your goal is to help the blue worm escape the maze in as few moves as possible. This is done by dragging the heads and/or tails of the various worms that stand in his way.
Again, you can see elements of Traffic Jam, but that game doesn't go around corners. Wriggle does, and, like Connected, it comes across as a wholly unique kind of puzzle.
Wriggle also offers a bit more replay value, with four difficulty levels and the option of replaying any puzzle to see if you can win in fewer moves. You can even tweet your progress, if you're into that kind of thing.
Initially, I judged both games by their covers (make that screenshots), and that was a mistake. Connected and Wriggle are perfectly priced and perfectly entertaining. I highly recommend both.
Seen any unique puzzle games lately? Are there any you just can't put down? Share your puzzle faves in the comments. In the meantime, check out these five perfect puzzle games for the iPhone.
Here's a little Friday fun for all you game fans: From now until Oct. 25, the insanely popular puzzle game World of Goo is on sale--and you get to name the price.
It normally sells for $20, but in honor of its first birthday, developer 2D Boy decided to run a little experiment. (Check out the results on the company's blog. Very interesting stuff.)
Basically, when you click the Get It button, you're whisked to a PayPal page where you specify your "donation" amount. (No PayPal account? Click the "continue" link on the left side to use a credit card.)
So, what'll it be? A penny? A five-spot? A sawbuck? If you're honestly not sure what the game is worth, download the demo before you pick a number. World of Goo is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux systems.
I'll admit I wasn't familiar with the game when I heard about this promotion, but it's without a doubt one of the cutest, weirdest, and most inventive puzzles I've ever played. You don't have to take my word: GameSpot awarded it a 9.0, as did several thousand readers.
I'm not going to reveal what I paid for it, as I don't want to influence anyone one way or the other. But I did pay for it--and definitely more than a penny.
How about you? Are you going to get your Goo on? If so, what's a fair price? (And how much did you actually pay?) Let's hear from you in the comments.
It's hard to keep us out of the kitchen, for no other reason than we just really enjoy food! Today we offer up a dilectable assortment of gourmet gadgets.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
Subscribe with iTunes (audio)
Subscribe with iTunes (video)
Subscribe with RSS (audio)
Subscribe with RSS (video)
EPISODE 156
Cocoon Cooker Grows Meat In Your Kitchen (thanks Bill!)
Ultrasonic dishwasher cleans your plates with waves of sound (thanks Sam!)
Ravi cools wine at the very moment it is poured
Cosentino turns minerals and woods into truly unique surfaces
LED Grabbing Tool Picks Valuables From Where Fingers Fear To Tread
Taylor Digital Measuring Cup Scale
... Read more
Nintendo games: you either like them or hate them. For most of the world, it's like. Among Nintendo's various cutesy-quirky franchises, a recent one--and one of Nintendo's best--happens to be the gorgeously designed puzzle adventure series known as Professor Layton. Although Japan has already seen four installments of the top-hatted man and his chipper little boy companion, English-speaking territories are only up to installment No. 2.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which hit the DS in early 2008, was a surprise critical hit and successfully balanced old-fashioned brainteasers with a graphic adventure. Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is now in stores, but CNET editors Jeff and Scott got a chance to play over the weekend. Their takes are below.
Scott:
Finally, a DS game worth buying! No offense, but it's been a rough couple of months since Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Rhythm Heaven hit in the spring. Nintendo's been very quiet with its own first-party releases, and Professor Layton 2 is one of its first big titles to sink your Nintendo fanboy teeth into. But even if you're not a fan, you might want to consider becoming one.
As in Curious Village, the game opens with beautiful voice-acting and a hand-drawn animation style, a throwback that almost looks like work from Hiyao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. While it's not exactly clear what the mystery is and why exactly Professor Layton and his boy wonder Luke end up daytripping on a train called the Molentary Express, give the game some patience and enjoy the random (and sometimes forced) puzzles. Soon enough you'll fall into the rhythm and enjoy a pretty excellent hybrid casual/adventure game.
The Professor Layton games make excellent use of the touch screen, both in navigation and puzzle-solving. One hundred fifty new brainteasers are part of the package, and Nintendo promises more available as free downloads like it did with Curious Village. It's a meaty but not epic amount of gameplay, and the 150 puzzles will take some time to figure out. In terms of the number of mysteries of sub-games available in Diabolical Box, it easily meets Curious Village and at times exceeds it.... Read more
Any diehard puzzle fan knows the game Triazzle, which started out in jigsaw form and later landed on PCs.
The goal: Arrange a set of triangular pieces so that the sides of each piece match up with sides of the board and the other pieces. It takes just seconds to learn, but, man, is it a challenge.
Triazzle for iPhone and iPod Touch delivers a beautifully animated, musically rich experience for newcomers and fans alike. It has all the makings of an instant classic.
The game gives you a choice between 9- and 16-piece puzzles and novice, intermediate, and advanced skill levels. It also has special 9-piece levels for kids, offering simplified graphics and unlimited hints.
Yes, hints. One difference between iPhone Triazzle and its cardboard predecessors is the presence of hints. You get a fixed number per level; each one reveals which piece belongs on whatever triangle you tap. (It's still up to you to figure out the piece's orientation, though.)
That's a terrific enhancement to the game, as it gives frustrated players the option of a helpful nudge while allowing purist puzzle-solvers to play hint-free if they prefer.
Other enhancements include a lovely musical score, various sound effects, and puzzle characters that wiggle, glow, or otherwise animate when you make a correct match.
If you decide to throw in the towel on a puzzle, just shake your iPhone to see the solution.
Triazzle costs $2.99, a small price to pay for a game that delivers one of the best puzzle experiences the iPhone has seen to date. Just one problem: Once my 9-year-old daughter gets her hands on it, I may never see her (or my iPhone) again.
Puzzle games and the iPhone and iPod Touch go together like peas and carrots (and they're nearly as good for you). They fit beautifully on the small screen, they have no awkward controls to master, and they're ideal when you have 5 minutes or 10 minutes to kill (and don't feel like killing things).
Here's a list of my five favorite puzzle games (so far):
- Hanoi A beautiful rendition of the classic Towers of Hanoi game. The object is simple: move a stack of disks from one side of the board to the other. There's not much replay value once you master it, but it's fantastic until you do. And, hey, it's free.
- Nintaii I had no idea what to expect from this game when I won it from AppGiveaway, but it took all of 30 seconds for me to fall in love. Like any good puzzler, this block-rolling, switch-activating brainteaser is easy to learn, challenging to play, and thoroughly rewarding to beat. The full version's on sale for 99 cents, but there's also a Lite freebie.
- Myst The puzzle game to end all puzzle games, Myst is a lush graphic adventure based on the eponymous PC classic. Well worth the $5.99 given the amount of gameplay you'll get from it--and if you can beat it, you're a smarter player than I.
- Unblock Me One of countless iPhone versions of the beloved Traffic Jam board game, Unblock Me challenges you to remove a red block by sliding other blocks out of the way. The free version gives you 400 puzzles to solve before going on to the 1,600-puzzle full version (which costs of all 99 cents).
- Twisty Text Lite I love Boggle-style games like TextTwist, which challenge you to build as many words as you can from a set of scrambled letters. Until I can get the real deal, Twisty Text easily satisfies my word-building cravings. It's similar to Free Word Warp, but I like the presentation and input method better.
Nintaii is just about the perfect puzzle game: clever, challenging, and fun.
OK, your turn: What puzzle games have earned a permanent home on your iPhone or Touch? I know I've left out some classics, like Bejeweled and Wurdle, but for me those are just played out.
Update: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that classic puzzler Jumble was announced for the iPhone just yesterday. Jumble Classic is $3.99 and available now.
Everything old is new again. Myst for iPhone and iPod Touch puts one of the best-selling computer games of all time into the palm of your hand. It's in the App Store now for $5.99.
If you're too young to remember Myst (in which case I hate you), it's a first-person graphical adventure that's not unlike dropping into the middle of "Lost." You find yourself on a deserted island (or is it?) filled with mysterious objects, machines, puzzles--maybe even a hatch or two.
The iPhone version looks just like its PC predecessor, from the rendered artwork to the puzzles and videos. It delivers all the original gameplay as well, meaning you get to experience all of Myst's Ages. Of course, instead of clicking on the screen with your mouse, you're tapping and swiping with your finger.
Despite its first-person design, Myst is no shooter--it's a slow-paced, play-in-the-bathtub kind of game, one that will undoubtedly appeal to those who like to find clues, unravel mysteries, tinker with funky machines, and so on.
Just make sure you have enough space for it. You need a whopping 1.5GB of free space to install Myst, though you get back roughly half that once the game's loaded. From there you just need time, patience, and a good brain (I'm batting 0 for 3 on that).
Two classic NES games are available for download this week on the Wii virtual console. Choose between a classic baseball-arcade sim and a puzzler inspired by everyone's favorite dinosaur sidekick.
- Yoshi's Cookie (1992, NES, 500 Wii points): Nintendo really tried to cash in on the whole Tetris era by developing many Nintendo-branded spin-offs. In Yoshi's Cookie, you'll take on 100 stages of cookie-themed puzzle action.
- Bases Loaded (1988, NES, 500 Wii points): A true classic, Bases Loaded brought arcade-style baseball into the home. Great gameplay combined with innovations, such as the first-ever view from the pitching mound, allow for this game to be fun even when played today.
What games do you think are missing from the Wii virtual console? Sound off here!
(Credit:
Aving)
Under normal circumstances we wouldn't get too worked up over a voice recorder, but we can't resist anything that even remotely looks like a puzzle. Olympus' "Voice Trek V-41," which goes for about $140 in Japan, reveals its USB plug when pulled apart. But it's got only 512MB of memory, which SlashGear notes isn't much for the price. If you're really that bored at work, you might be better off buying a recorder with more storage and bringing your Transformer toys to the office separately.
Puzzle Quest is one of the scariest games I've seen in years. I'm no stranger to game addictions. I've been on and off World of Warcraft three times now (permanently off now; I'm not getting the expansion and don't like raiding), and have been hooked on everything from Oblivion to Zelda. Puzzle Quest offers the kind of nightmarish addictive powers I haven't seen since Tetris DS and Lumines. I have no idea why, but there's just something compelling about shuffling around blocks to get points.
Bejeweled is one of the archetypical puzzle games. Slide around icons until three or more match, and when they disappear and other blocks fall, try to get those to match to produce a point-generating waterfall of disappearing blocks. Almost everyone's played it, whether on a computer or a cell phone. It's simply inexplicably addictive. Puzzle Quest takes that addictiveness and mixes it up with the addictiveness of role-playing games to create a hideous eldrich monster of can't-put-it-downability
A look at GameSpot's reviews of the game will give you an idea of the system: basic Bejeweled gameplay combined with RPG aspects such as levels, stats, spells, monsters, dungeons, and even mounts. Match colored orbs for mana, jewels and coins for experience and money, and skulls to damage your enemy. As you level up through combat, you get more and more skills and higher attributes, letting you take on more formidable foes with deeper strategies. Pretty soon it becomes much more than simple gem-matching. Chipping away at the enemy by matching three skulls simply isn't enough, and you have to start using spells and tactics to set yourself up for massive cascades. Even the battles and quests themselves can vary in complexity. Besides the simple battles mentioned above, devious premade puzzles to capture enemies and mounts, special tile-breaking puzzles to forge items and learn spells, and even timed matches to train mounts add to the game's depth.
Puzzle Quest pretty much ate up my weekend. I simply couldn't put it down. By Sunday night, I was seeing skulls and orbs slide around in my mind. I haven't had game flashbacks so bad since Tetris DS came out. I kept wanting to play one more game, fight one more battle, get one more rune, level up my mount one more time. Finally, I just gave my DS to a friend so I wouldn't be tempted to play it anymore. Granted, I also wanted to read two more Dresden Files novels before the next one, White Night, comes out, but still! I've never done that before, not even with Tetris DS.
It isn't a perfect game. Both the DS and PSP versions have their own share of irritating bugs. The PSP has some loading time hiccups, the DS' touch screen doesn't work quite as smooth as it should, and neither have any sort of online play. But, it will still eat up your time like candy and have you screaming about hit points at 4:00 in the morning. It's handheld crack.
Now to get my DS back. I need to level up...
