Posted: 10-17-2001
Damn those
jewels. Damn them
straight to hell.
I’m
talking about Bejeweled,
an on-line game from (of all places) the MSN Gaming Zone.
But I warn you before clicking on that link --- as you may have
inferred from my opening remarks --- it is a maddeningly
addicting game.
It’s
simple too. The playing
field is an 8x8 grid of multi-colored jewels (rubies, sapphires,
diamonds, etc.). You
score points by trying to create matching rows or columns of three or
more jewels. Swapping adjacent gems with each other creates matches.
When you create the matches the jewels vanish from the playing
field (a la Tetris rows) causing the jewels above to fill in the gaps.
When you can no longer create matches the game is finished.
Actually,
that description makes the game sound a little too complicated.
Heck, click on the link and check
it out for yourself. Don’t let the simplicity fool you though, there is a bit of
strategy in there. If you
are like me, you’ll soon be looking for the optimal jewel-swap move
and hoping to score a nice bonus with row-column combo matches.
While I was
enjoying the on-line version, I started to think that this would be a
great game to play on my aging Palm
III. Sure enough a quick search of download.com
revealed Astraware
had done a nice version of Bejeweled.
You are limited to ten games before being asked to register.
There is also a stand-alone PC edition that you can snag from ZDNet's hotfiles.com. You can grab that here. While I couldn't find any Mac or Linux downloadable versions --- Apple and Penguin fans should be able to play the online version from PopCap (the creators of Bejeweled) if Java is enabled in your web browser. Incidentally, the PopCap folks call their version of the game Diamond Mine. Just an FYI.
Till next time,
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