Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
Zuma …
Here is one of the greatest time-wasters ever! I have no way to gauge popularity of games like this other than my reaction from personally playing them, but I would guess this to be highly popular. I know it’s one of the games I play most often.
This is an example of a single-person game that can be highly entertaining, as well as highly frustrating. Many people can play this game, but only one at a time. You can compare achievement by score or by highest level attained.
Those playing for the first time can get almost as must enjoyment as those playing for the fiftieth time!
The task is simple: aim your shooter at groups of two or more balls of the same color and click to shoot a ball. Your ball might be red, for example, so you would look for red balls to shoot at. There might be two or more red balls together, or there might be only one. In the former case, when you shoot a red ball, the group of reds explodes and the ring of balls closes up.
If there’s only one ball of your color, you can shoot, which will make a pair. When you get another ball of that color, you can shoot to explode the pair. Your shooter ball changes color (or may not) when you shoot, so you are constantly looking for a group of balls of the same color as your shooter.
The target balls move along a raceway, sometime quickly, sometimes slowly, so you must aim quickly and fire, in order to explode and score.
You win if you explode all the balls before the first one in line gets to the mouth. Once that happens, the balls quickly fall into the mouth and you cannot shoot any more. You can try again, up to twice more.
You start out with three chances to win, represented by frogs. As you play the game, you score points. Each time your score reaches a multiple of 50,000, you receive an additional frog. If you can keep playing for a while, you can build up quite a backlog of frogs, which means you can play longer.
A level of the game is a series of matches from 5 to 8. Once you conquer all the matches in a level, you advance to the next level. There are 15 levels in all, but it’s unlikely you’ll get anywhere near that any time soon! The levels become more difficult as you progress level by level.
There is a free on-line version of Zuma at popcap.com, which may a good place to start. It’s fairly simple and it’s free. You cannot save your place if you are interrupted, and the points are like Whose Line …, the points don’t matter!
More fun, though, is to download the full version of Zuma for $20 and have entertainment for years! I highly recommend this game. There are many other games on the web site, as well, but few as entertaining as Zuma.
Popcap Games is an interesting company. It’s relatively new, starting only in 2000, but it has 66 employees and has available 31 different games.
Zuma by Popcap Games popcap.com Price to download full game $20, free to play on-line.
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