$99.95… and I never slept again
Rocketmania!
But these days, I never feel like jumping into some big, epic video game world unless I have multiple hours to devote to it, and since I have a job and stuff, that’s pretty much never. So more often than not I go looking for something I can play in twenty minutes and be done with. Of course, this never happens — the beauty of casual games is that is that they’re one of the most addictive substances science has ever created, and I wind up playing for hours anyway, usually at the expense of REM sleep. And whenever I want to lie to myself and say I’m going to sit down for “just one quick game,” Popcap is there for me.
I love Popcap Games. Yes, they brought us the original Bejeweled and something like eight or ten sequels, but they have so much more to offer than those multicolored gems. And twenty bucks a pop might seem a bit steep for a PC download (on the Xbox they’re half that price), but that’s why they let you play each game as a free sample for a full hour. At that point it has its hooks into you, and only charging twenty bucks could probably be considered merciful on their part.
Here are a few of the games that burned themselves onto my retinas while I was supposed to be sleeping:
Plants Vs. Zombies. This is pretty much the new hotness at Popcap, and for good reason. It’s a stripped-down Tower Defense: zombies work their way across your lawn and you plant various species of flowers to attack them. You have to balance attacking plants with ones that generate the sun-juice that lets you build your arsenal, and of course they keep throwing increasingly awful undead abominations at you. Like all such games, I usually feel like I’m doing really well for the first three or four levels, and then immediately get overrun and utterly destroyed.
Bookworm Adventures. I love regular Bookworm as well, but this is the one where you use your scrabble skills to defeat various mythical creatures. It has everything! And somewhere deep inside, a seventh-grade version of me who was devoted to word games and greek mythology in roughly equal measures just peed a little.
Alchemy. This one is a little tougher to describe. You have a grid, and get a random series of tiles to place next to other tiles with a matching color or matching symbol. It gets really mathy, you guys. I need to tell you that I was deep into Alchemy for a while. I think certain neural connections in my brain reconfigured themselves based on the little strategies I concocted to try and clear the higher levels. And by “higher levels” I mean levels above “three,” because no matter how much as I play these games I never get particularly good at them.
Rocketmania. Like Alchemy, this is one of the deep roster Popcap games that I’ve never seen any promotion for, but randomly clicked on and got sucked in. It’s also probably my single favorite game on the site. You rotate individual segments of this tangled mass of fuses in order to connect the lit firepots on the left of the screen to the waiting fireworks on the right. A timer counts down as you do, so it’s all about identifying the patterns and twitching your little mouse hand as quickly as you can to make them happen. This is actually the exception to my general “I kind of suck at games” rule, because I will kick your ASS at Rocketmania, people.
Peggle. Ah, Peggle. I was considering doing this one as its own post a couple of weeks ago, but the truth is there’s just not that much to write about Peggle because it’s barely even a game. You fire little pinballs from the top of the screen which bounce randomly off of various pegs. Seriously, anybody who tells you that they meant the ball to bounce one way or the other in Peggle is lying. And yet it’s so much fun. Different levels are hosted by different adorable animal pals, and each of them has its own special power to help you pretend you’re doing stuff on purpose. And when you clear a board it plays “Ode to Joy” in this huge triumphant celebration that makes you feel like you just cured cancer or something. Peggle has brought me so much happiness. Download the free trial — if you don’t fall in love with this game, you’re probably just dead inside.
Until March 7, Popcap is offering a package deal where you can get their entire catalog — that’s 51 games — for $99.95. You may be the kind of person who can pass something like that up (in fact, I kind of hope you are), but I think we’ve already established that I am not that guy. They’ll email you a master registration code that works with every game, which you can then install at your leisure. Also, I couldn’t decide if I wanted Rocketmania on my desktop or my laptop machine, so I installed it on both and it didn’t give me any guff, so they seem to be pretty chill with their DRM as well. Now, I highly recommend that you go check out some free samples first. A hundred bucks isn’t chicken scratch, and you shouldn’t do anything hasty.
I snatched it up without a moment’s hesitation, of course. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off playing commitment-free, 20-minute casual games for the next MILLION YEARS.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I love Zuma and Peggle Nights. Partly because Bjorn the Unicorn, already pastel, and you know, a unicorn, manages to out-fey himself by wearing an ascot and a purple smoking jacket. Also, Bonnie’s Bookstore is just tragic. If you love life at all, never darken her door.
I actually enjoy playing Bonnie’s Bookstore — it’s a word game quite similar to the first Bookworm — but yeah, Bonnie herself just looks kind of sickly and sad. It’s like your soul-crushingly lonely friend has invited you over to play “Bananagrams,” and part of you knows it’s the only human interaction she’s likely to see all month.
::hastily cancels evite::
Somebody told me the saw a study that proved that Peggle is effectively an antidepressant. I didn’t look into it, because it didn’t want it to not be true. Peggle is so good.
Seriously, if you can remain depressed after scoring “Ultra Extreme Fever,” you are a more morose person than I.
Alchemy is my fave rave. I cannot tell a lie.
Yay Alchemy! They have a bunch of Hidden Object games too — I don’t know if the “Mystery P.I.” series is any good, but I own like six of them now.
Popcap really needs to release Plants vs. Zombies II. Desperately. I want it so.