| The first installment is courtesy of Chris Lemon, diehard gamer and the brain behind some of our exclusive trivia games, who seems to favor Jewel Quest (excellent choice, Chris!). We’ll have a new Staff Pick every Friday, I believe, so look for it in the Community and Events section of the MSN Games front page.
Also new this week is our Community Events Calendar, a handy list of upcoming badges, new trivia games, behind-the-scenes features, and opportunities for you to beat us at our own game. This week, we’ll be playing Hearts. Next time, who knows? Keep an eye on the calendar to find out when we’ll be playing your favorite multiplayer game!
Needless to say, I’m thrilled that some of my cohorts here are coming out of their shells, emerging from the gloom of anonymity to blink in the unaccustomed light of Internet day. If nothing else, at least it’s finally obvious that, yes, there are more people here than just zmaster and me!
Matchmaker, matchmaker…
So of course by now it’s also quite obvious that I’m a big fan of good match-three games. Whenever we launch a new one on the site, I just have to try it out. And while I’ve never met a match-three game I didn’t like, some of them really do stand out from the crowd. The newest one on my list of “reasons I won’t be getting any housework done this weekend” is Treasures of Montezuma, which combines the standard color-matching gameplay with a few intriguing twists, such as the ability to collect powerups by making a certain match multiple times, and the chance to shop for new powerups as the game goes on.
The most interesting thing about Montezuma, though, and the primary reason it caught my attention away from all the other shiny games on our site, is how difficult it becomes in the later levels. And I’m not talking about the sort of difficulty that causes you to get all frustrated and consider using your monitor for boxing practice. It’s the sort that makes you think. As a die-hard puzzle junkie, I'm used to cruising all the way through a game without more than a few grumbles and curses. But with Montezuma, it becomes obvious fairly early on that you can't just play on autopilot; you have to really plan ahead. And frankly, that makes me really, really happy.
Basically, the deal is this: on each level of the game, you need to remove a certain number of gems from the board. And that number increases by five gems with every single level. By around the end of the second set of levels, you start to realize that you literally do not have enough time in each round to remove all the gems. Trouble, right? There are, however, certain powerups that add extra time to the clock. So instead of just frantically making matches to collect gems, you find yourself carefully planning and setting up the right combinations to generate these powerups. I've currently finished about 60% of the game, and I'm no longer even bothering to match gems... I'm too busy generating the time-extension powerups and the ones that remove all current gems from the board. It’s a very different type of strategy!
The other particularly cool thing about this game is that you earn stars while playing and can use them to buy powerups between levels... or un-buy them if they’re not helpful to you, and then reuse the stars for something else. It's a great touch. For instance, there’s one powerup that randomly changes the color of certain tiles. Great, in theory, but since my play style involves carefully setting up matches of a specific color, you can bet that I ditched that particular powerup almost immediately and used the star to buy a score bonus.
Basically, Treasures of Montezuma takes a lot more thought than your average matching game, and that's fantastic for puzzle veterans like me!
Square deal
I believe I’ve mentioned before that my favorite badge so far was “Squaresville,” right? It’s not that I’m particularly great at Cubis: I love the game, but it’s a rare day that I manage to clear a whole screen without leaving a bunch of blocks behind (and being teased for it by anyone here who might be watching). So it’s not that I love Squaresville because I adore the game it was for. It was just so… so… cute!! Little square people in their little square-wheeled car.
Well, I now have a new favorite badge, and wonder of wonders, it’s for Cubis again… well, Cubis 2, anyway. And again, it’s not because I want to commemorate my conquer-all-puzzle skills at the game. I swear! It’s just so adorable, again! Even better than Squaresville. I really do need to go down to the art room, find out which one of our pixel-wranglers is responsible for creating “The Art Exhibit”, and buy them a muffin or something. Seriously. Even if you’re not usually a Cubis player, I recommend getting this badge just so you can see the animation for it! | |
| Tech talk
Looks like we’ve been getting questions about Text Twist, Word Mojo, and Dynomite loading with just a black screen. (Weird, but true.) Turns out it happens when your system is running an older version of Java. Just upgrade to the new version, and you’ll be back in the game.
Zmaster is bugging me to add, and I quote, that “Microsoft cannot vouch for the security and reliability of solutions offered by other companies.” Because, really, what’s a day on the Internet without some sort of disclaimer? (Which reminds me of my favorite t-shirt… how cool is that?)
See you next time! | |
