Three Popcap Games for iPhone

Hi, I am Jay Goldman and you’re watching Mr. Mobile on butterscotch.com. Today, I look at three very fun PopCap Games. Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock or you’re not a big fan of causal gaming, you have definitely played a PopCap game. They’ve been around for quite a while and they’ve been producing their classic Bejeweled for pretty much any platform that supports playing video games. In fact, I am pretty sure I’ve even seen it running on some digital cameras. So, you’ve probably played Bejeweled on more than one platform. In fact, you probably bought Bejeweled in more than one platform because they’ve made about a trillion dollars from it by releasing it on every new thing that comes out, which means that people who buy that new thing have to buy the game again and sort of like how the record industries made you buy the same album on vinyl and then on 8-track and then cassette and then on CD and now for your iPhone. So, Bejeweled 2 is now out for the iPhone. You’ll find it in the app store. And it’s $2.99 and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a game that is just sort of mindless and you can play it for a long period of time. So, you know, sitting in waiting rooms, on transit, that kind of stuff. It’s a great game to just while away the hours. When you launch the application, it gives you the choice of which mode you’d like to play in. And the three choices are classic which is the classic mode of playing Bejeweled and you basically take turns until you run out of moves. Action which is a variant that has a countdown timer at the bottom and you play until you run out of time or Endless which will guarantee that there is always a move available to you and you can pretty much play the game for as long as you’d like. The other choices of that main screen are Scores which gives you access to High scores. Options which gives you access to a limited settings panel which you can set the sound effects volume, game music and whether you’d like to auto hint or not. Auto hinting is just a little triangle that pops up and floats over the next move that you can make if you delay for long enough and haven’t got a move. If you have the game on the go when you choose a mode and I do have a classic game on the go, you can resume where you were before or you can start a new game. This is really handy if you get interrupted with something like a phone call or you have to switch off your iPhone for some reason. The basics of playing the game involves swapping the positions of gems. You can swap a gem over to the left or right or up and down to try and line up three gems of the same color. Lining up four will give you a super gem that glows at the bottom and explodes when it gets taken out. Lining up five or more will give you a gem that actually can be swapped for any color of other gems. If you get stocked on at any time, hit the Hint button at the bottom and it will show you a move that you can make. And when you level up, you’ll see that’s you got a score increase and you can just basically keep playing the game until you run out of moves in the classic mode. So, Bejeweled 2 is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it for the casual gamers out there, especially if you played Bejeweled on other platforms that are missing it on your iPhone and it is available in the app store. Check the download links on the show notes on butterscotch.com for easy finding it. Now, we’re going to take a look at a second PopCap game. This one is called Bookworm and it’s a great one for people who like things like Bagel or word games where you have to match up different words that appear out of a selection of tiles on the screen. It’s a really simple game to play. There is not a whole lot to it. It basically just involves tapping on letters in sequence to create words and they’ll disappear and new tiles pop in from the top. There are two modes you can play Bookworm in, classic game or time game. There are some limited options available in the game around whether you’d like to see things like hints and definitions of words, whether you’d like sound effects or music volume up or down and whether you’d like to confirm the scramble. If you get sort of stock looking for words, you can actually shake your iPhone to scramble the tiles up. And that confirmation just makes sure that you really meant to do that before it just goes ahead and does it for you. If you’ve got a game in progress and I do have a classic game in progress here, you can see a little save game ribbon to remind you that you had a game going. And when you open it up, you have the choice of starting a new game or continuing much the same way that you do in Bejeweled 2. Making words is as simple as tapping on the letters in the right sequence and you will see them up here at the top of the screen as you start going through. You need to make words that are three letters or longer. And they need to be recognized words or Bookworm won’t let you actually complete them. When you’ve got a word up on your screen that you’d like to complete, you can tap on the white area at the top where the Bookworm is telling you the word or you can double tap on the last tile that you tapped on and the word will complete and new tiles would come in from the top. Look out for the burning tiles. If they burn their way down to the bottom of the board, your game is actually over. So, you want to try and use those tiles up as quickly as you can. And you want avoid getting burning tiles if possible by spelling longer words. The shorter words that you spell, the more burning tiles you’ll see. Anytime you see a green tile, you should definitely use it because it gives you a bonus in completing a word that involves it. It doesn’t matter where it is in the word. So, use them up when possible. And they don’t actually disappear, so there’s not a big rush but you want to use them before they fall at the bottom of the screen. I actually really enjoy Bookworm. I am fan of the word games. My wife is a huge Bookworm fan. So she’s actually played it for hours while she is sort of sitting and waiting for other stuff to happen and she really, really enjoys it. So, give it a look if you’re a fan of that kind of game. Now, the last game we’re going to take a look at today is by far my favorite of the three. It’s called Peggle. Now, if you’ve ever seen a Japanese game called Pachinko or maybe you’ve actually seen the prices right game where they sort of drop things from the top and it bounces down on all the pegs, then you’re familiar with the general concept to this game. The difference here is that the pegs actually disappear after you shoot them with a little ball. And so the goal is to try and clear the screen out and there are different colored pegs that mean different things. Peggle only runs in landscape mode, so you’ll have to turn your phone to the side when you want to play it. It’s got a real sense of humor as you can tell by the unicorn that appears on the main screen here and on some of the other characters that appear as you’re going through the game. Tap on one of the modes to get started. I am going to tap on adventure mode here. Two ways to play the game, you can either tap where you’d like the shooter to point to or you can use the wheel down the side to aim at more finely. And you’ll see the little dots coming out of it show you where the ball is going to go. When you’ve got to aim where you’d like, tap on the fire button and your ball will shoot out and go and bounce through all of the pegs lighting up the ones that it hits which will disappear when the ball falls at the bottom. The little thing going side to side across the bottom of the screen will actually give you your ball back if you manage to land it in there. The goal here is to clear the screen without running out of balls. So, you’ll note down the left side, I’ve got a number of balls remaining now. And that little stack of balls goes down every time I shoot one. If I run out of balls before I finish the level, game over. Clearing the stage will give you a bonus score calculated by the bar on the right side. You see that there are markings for a two multiplier, three, five and 10. You also see receptacles that appear across the bottom and the final ball will bounce into one of them which will give you an additional bonus of 105 or a 100,000 points. I am big a Peggle fan, I’ve got to say. It’s a lot of fun to play. It’s surprising how much fun it is to play given that there is not a lot of skill involved other than choosing sort of aim where the ball is going to be at the beginning and firing it. Once it starts bouncing around, you’re really helpless. You just sit there and watch it but it’s a lot of fun to play and it probably my favorite of the three. So, if you’re only going to buy one of the three games we’ve covered today, Peggle would be my choice. Of course if you're more of a Bookworm fan or a Bejeweled fan, you’re probably make those choices for yourself. I am Jay Goldman. This has been Mr. Mobile. Thanks for watching. Check butterscotch.com for some other episodes. We’ll catch you next time.