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Kablooey/Bombuzal
(To any sane person, safely detonating bombs is not quite as much fun as blowing
people up.)
Basically, you control a guy. You wander from level to level. These levels contain bombs which you must all detonate without killing yourself. Once you've detonated all these bombs, you go onto the next level and start again.
When detonated, each bomb has an explosion area, and a larger area, within which any bombs present are also detonated. This leads to the setting up of chain reactions, all of which must start with the smallest bomb, since you can only move 1 space away before the bomb you just detonated explodes.
If you understood that badly written pish, I applaud you.
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how far I got: played the 1-player game for a couple of hours and got rather bored.
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rating : 32
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I personally enjoy playing puzzle games. One factor is the fact that even if the game ends up being boring and repetitive, there will be the initial interesting bit as you learn some new set of rules.
After all, most platform, racing or beat 'em up games have similar rules, but when a new puzzle game comes out, you expect it to be reasonably original in this respect. Even Wildsnakes, Logical and other crap puzzle games fulfil this criteria. So do decent puzzle games like Lemmings and Puyo Puyo. Then you've got the matter of stuff like Puyo Puyo and Tetris being repeatedly re-done, but hey... This isn't at all important to this review. So I'll stop blethering on now.
As with a lot of puzzle games, even after reading about the rules (which are explained above) you can only really understand how much you'll enjoy this when you play it.
The levels require a fair bit of lateral thinking, and whilst you might not want to do that many at a time, you've got a password to which can return. However, there's always the chance that you'll never return after switching off the machine...
I personally found the levels a bit slow-moving and rather tedious. It's hard for me to say why this is when I enjoyed Mario's Picross, but if I was pushed I'd suggest it had something to do with the fact that in this game, trial and improvement seems to be the only option for a lot of people once the later levels start. Also, working out what to do without this trial and improvement just seems too difficult and too remote a possibility. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the way the explosions work seems a little hard to visualise, and the earlier levels don't really do as much as they could to train you for the later levels.
Overall, if you're a person who enjoys staring at the screen for 20 minutes to work out a puzzle, and is also quite good at visualising puzzles, then youll enjoy this. Myself, I found it too hard and decided that I prefer the lightweight real-time variety.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends