So, in my Facebook feed I have a friend who plays bunches and bunches of those mindjolt games, various puzzles, etc. Most of those games are crap, I’ve tried a few here and there.
Well, one day she posts the comment (after scoring a high score) that a game was ‘pretty good’, but she wished it had a preview piece feature similar to Tetris. Well, most flash games aren’t a good puzzle like Tetris is, but her comment made me try it.
And Now; I’ve been playing the darn thing in the evenings at home whenever I get a chance for the last several weeks. It is a very good game.
It’s called “Combine” I’m sure you can Google that if your interested in trying it and you’re not on Facebook. But the thing is, it’s different. It is a puzzle like Tetris, but it’s not against the clock. In fact, you have as much time as you want to place your piece each turn, the only key is how you rotate and place it.
But the kicker is that when you connect at least three circles orthogonally, the pieces don’t just disappear, they turn into a new colored ball, which you have to combine, also the pool of balls the game gives you will grow to include that color. So over time, the game will give you more balls of varying color and it slowly fills up your grid.
So, here’s my rant, I love this game, I think it’s a great game, and the low ‘twitch’ and ‘reflex’ factor make it a very interesting puzzle. But as you get to the higher difficulties, the game breaks down, in that the pool of balls I am getting are so intermixed I can no longer combine them as needed.
I feel like I’m doing the best I can, but there are people in the high score list scoring multiple hundreds of thousands of points, and the best I can get is something like 130k.
Anyway, I was bored one night and recorded my playing of the game, set it to some generic music in garage band and posted it to youtube, it happens to be my current high score game as well. Maybe you can give me some pointers?!? I sped this up 2.5 times to make it fit on youtube in the allotted 10 minutes.
To me, it looks like I’m doing pretty solid, but it breaks down fast at the higher levels.
I’ve also started playing a similar game on my iPhone. It’s called Alchemize, it has the same idea behind it. It does have a preview feature.