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World of Warcraft: The Bejeweled Crusade
By Cameron Sorden | September 20, 2008
I have an on-again off-again love affair with casual games. They can be a lot of fun, as anyone with access to the Microsoft Live Arcade knows. If you’re interested, I know a whole slew of obscure indie RPG and fantasy strategy games that I could recommend. But I also like the simpler games like Puzzle Quest, Dungeon Scroll, Bookworm Adventures, and Bejeweled. That’s why I was so excited to see Mike Schramm’s latest article over at WoW Insider. Apparently, Popcap games is bringing their popular match-three game Bejeweled to your World of Warcraft play experience.
Any MMOG player knows that you spend a lot of time waiting in online games: waiting for a rez, waiting for a flight path, waiting for people to show up for your instance run. What a great idea to add a game of Bejeweled in to kill time during the downtime:
If you leave the addon in the default settings, it’ll surprise you — every time you jump on a flightpoint, the game pops up with a “Go!” and you’re thrown into a timed mode, rushing to make as many matches as you can before you land (and you get a nice high score screen after landing). Every trip on the griffon turns into a race to beat your high score. Even while raiding, the game makes the experience better — I was in Karazhan last night, and upon death during a wipe, Bejeweled popped up on the screen — as my friends died around me, I matched some gems, and waited for the call to rez or run back.
Savvy gamers will recall that WoW is not, in fact, the first major MMOG to have a casual game embedded for the purpose of killing time. Some of you might remember EverQuest’s Gems minigame, one of the best ways in Norrath to kill time while waiting for that agonizingly long spawn of the mob you’re camping. However, Bejeweled is light years ahead of that (despite being a fairly old game) with the inclusion of exciting sounds and proper visuals (and it sounds like they even made it WoW-themed).
There have been other addons that inject minigames into WoW prior to this one, but this appears to be the first one designed and officially sponsored by an actual casual game developer. I’m really excited to get it and check it out! As Mike points out in the article, you can’t then use that time to alt-tab and look up strats, but it probably makes for a more fluid and fun game experience.
Go check out the article and grab the addon when it releases this Thursday.
Topics: Casual Games, Massively Multiplayer, World of Warcraft |