Pong and Beyond

11th game played so far

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Popcap
Publisher: Popcap

This was not a game we actively scheduled this early on (since we rely on a mixture of a random number generator and personal choice) but it came out of a rather slow evening when I had a fancying for playing Scrabble. I never know why I go through these Scrabble phases… I start playing it and then get bored within 10 minutes.

Bookworm is very similar to Scrabble in many ways, you try to make as long a word as possible out of the tiles provided…. however there are flaming tiles involved which change the game somewhat.

Our Playthrough

This is the victim of some late-night playing resulting in both of us feeling rather tired and disorientated the next day… totally worth it.

Our Thoughts

Bookworm. So you have a worm, a grid of letters, and you have to make words using the letters and impress the worm. And if you do not impress the worm then he tries to set the library on fire with the flaming letters… Apparently, then, it’s an evil worm that hates words, and you stop him by making words. Then again he does give the opportunity to play with golden and diamond letters… so he’s an evil worm with a love of bling.
In other words, there’s no story and what happens doesn’t make much sense, but the game is good fun, even though it did not seem to be our kind of game. Well, like I mentioned before, Scrabble is as dull as dishwater. And English isn’t my first language. Yet you can swear like a pro, even if you can not use swearwords in the game. I’ve learned the important words. And yeah, that’s the one vocabulary part that surprised us. But I guess it makes sense, if it included all members of the swearing rainbow then you would have to have an age restriction present. ‘Crap’, though? To some people ‘hell’ is incredibly offensive.
Anyway, it looks pretty, the gameplay is good, but it’s a puzzlegame – while we can explain the gameplay, and say it gets addictive – the last game took over an hour and that was ended simply because we had to write this bit. You can easily play this for hours on end… as long as your eyes don’t go square first. And you can stand all the Y’s and J’s that start filling up the bottom of the board

Final Thoughts

This is a nice word-based puzzle game, simple, yet challenging, it looks good and is a lot of fun to play – like a lot of the Popcap games. And the trial is available for free, so no reason not to try it.