Then there’s a weekly challenge mode designed to keep you booting it up every now and then, but success here depends entirely on whether you’ve got a group of friends who are also playing. Zuma’s Revenge also features speed-based multipliers and boss battles, where you need to blast open holes in the environment before firing marbles into the face of nasty island devils. While the difficulty level is quite a lot lower than the fingernail-shredding level of the original, there’s some loose strategy based on power-ups, thinking a couple of moves ahead and chaining moves into snazzy combos, with the resulting explosions of colour lighting up the screen like a nail bomb made of skittles. Marbles of the same colour stick to one another, so you’ll end up gob-blasting little clumps of colour before having them promptly disappear. The core of the game has you flinging coloured marbles out of your mouth at a snaking procession of fellow (enemy?) marbles following a wobbly line around the screen. Still, I’m guessing most Zuma players probably won’t have played the game in years – which makes this recently released Xbox LIVE Arcade version a refreshing puzzler and also a nice stroll down memory lane. Why Zuma’s Revenge, which was released on PC in 2009, has taken three years to cross over to Xbox LIVE Arcade is beyond me. That didn’t happen, of course: Zuma was developed and sold about six hojillion copies. It’s at this point the executive would take the cigar out of his mouth and, speaking slowly but forcefully, resentment thick in the air, ask “ a magic toad?” “It’s also a game where…” here the poor employee’s voice would falter, worried for what comes next, “you shoot balls out of the mouth of a possibly magical but nonetheless happy toad.” Spurred on by this warm reception, the employee would continue. Here, thanks to flashbacks of Bejeweled, the executive’s brain would turn into an overexcited calculator, his eyes would light up with dollar signs and the sound of a cash register would ring his ears. “It’s basically a match-three puzzle game,” a beleaguered designer would mutter as he pitches the idea to a senior executive across a gargantuan but tastefully modest oak table. I like to imagine the pitch for Zuma in my head, and while I’ve thought of hundreds of combinations over the years they usually go like this:
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