Gamma Testing: Bookworm Adventures

Okay, so I've soured on Auto Assault (I'll have a wrap-up sometime soon, I hope.) And remarkably quickly. What game, you might ask, has taken up the slack? Surely it must be something sophisticated, complex, and breathtakingly wonderful to capture my fractured attention span and drive me to play it to exhaustion. And, you know, you'd be right. See, I've been playing Bookworm Adventures lately and I'm about this close to purchasing the full version.

Bookworm Adventures is a sequel, of sorts to another game from PopCap Games. Always been a fan of their games from the highly addictive Zuma to the “make learning fun” of the original Bookworm. I take it they're best known for Bejeweled which is also a very nicely done game. Bookworm Adventures, though, is a bit of a departure for the company. Basically, the idea of the game is to blend the original spelling based gameplay of Bookworm with the leveling and powering up of a typical RPG. The resulting product is a blast as you'll battle enemies by spelling words and using items as you're on a quest. Longer words do more damage and each attack comes with an animation. If you use certain letters or do enough damage you get special effects to happen. I'm not exactly the best speller around but I think it's good practice even though I'm well out of school – be great for people who have kids who want to play video games to slip a little learning under their noses the way my parents did with things like MathBlaster and the like.

Gameplay goes like this: you start a level and you have several enemies to beat before you can go to the next level. At the end of each level is a boss who's guarding a treasure. Defeat the boss and you get the treasure which gives you some bonus like more defense or bonus damage when you use a specific letter. Enemies will use various attacks on you and slowly whittle away your health over a few turns. Now, as I mentioned you attack by spelling out words. You get a 4x4 grid of letter tiles that would be familiar to anyone who's played Scrabble. The most common letters are marked by a bronze pip, more infrequently used ones by a silver one, and the rarest ones with gold. The amount of damage you do is calculated somehow by your level and the "score" of each letter in your word - and maybe even any defenses your enemy has. There are special abilities and status effects that turn the simple little idea of taking sixteen letters and turning them into a word into a crazy, tension filled fight to the death. The game does a nice job of introducing the gameplay elements - slowly and letting you play around with them once they show up - so it's all very easy to understand. All the while the game maintains a running commentary - letting you know when you're spelling words that are going to do better damage by saying "Nice", for instance. And there's banter between the main character, a glasses wearing worm, and his enemies as well as cutscenes. There's a corny, pun-laced sense of humor on display that somehow manages not to be overly cloying - normally I hate that sort of thing but it just makes me smile a bit here. There's occasional mini-games to break up the flow of things and if you advance far enough you unlock different modes of play. The game also tracks several "high scores" such as the length of your words so the replay factor is high.

There's a free demo available, so check it out if you want to see for yourself. It's a very small file and installs in no time flat which is always a plus for me – when I want to play a game I don't want to sit around and wait to play it, I want to install it and get playing right away before my interest cools. And unlike other PopCap demos (Not the flash versions but the ones you can actually download) I've seen it's not timed. It ends once you get to a certain point in the story (I'm not going to spoil it because although the story is pretty lame it's also cute with some good tongue-in-cheek humor but suffice to say it's an epic boss battle.) but you can go back and retry it over and over again. I've played through it more than a few times myself. My best word so far is “Audiophile”. I've done more damage with other words because if you use rarer letters like “Z” or “K” and special letter tiles you can ramp up the damage considerably. But “Audiophile” is my longest and that one earned me a “Whomped” which I have no idea what it does exactly but it seems to crop up when you defeat an enemy in a particularly crushing manner. So it's really satisfying. I've also discovered an easter egg as spelling “Julie” gets you a special message and, unlike other proper names, can actually be used as an attack. Sorry to geek out like this but the point would be that I'm gushing because this game is really, really fun to play and I really, really like it. So I've been rambling about how great it is in one venue or another for a while now. This appears to be a not infrequent occurrence.

The full game's $29.95 which seems a bit pricey to me. It's not the biggest game or the most graphically wonderful. At $20 I would have bought the game and you wouldn't have seen me for about a week, probably. That's about what I'd consider a fair price so I'm currently torn between wanting to play the rest of the game and wanting to wait until after the holidays when the price might drop. And, you know, I might have some spare money for it. I'm having more than enough fun so far with the demo (Not to mention I'm busy with other things) so I don't really mind waiting.

But, on the other hand, I'd like to reward the developers of the game for making something like Bookworm Adventures. It's a “casual” game just like everything PopCap does. It's light and breezy and not bogged down in chasing after the latest hardware specs or arcane rules and exceptions and instead concentrates on providing simple, fun gameplay that's going to be good for years and years to come. It's the differnce between, say, Diablo and Ultima Online. For me, anyway. But looking into the game I see that it was a colossal undertaking by the standards of PopCap. While they normally spend maybe $100,000 and a few months making a well-crafted game they took two and a half years and closer to $700k (Which is why they're charging a bit more than they usually do, I guess). There's voice acting in the game, polished graphics, and plenty to explore, it seems. That's, of course, nothing compared to the budget for, say, the average FPS like Gears of War. And it pales in comparison to the average MMO. But, well, I haven't played a game half as fun all year. PopCap isn't the only company making casual games and they seem to be getting better as time goes by. For me, anyway, I tend to write them off as something less than deserving of my time. Not when there's Guild Wars and WoW and a dozen other games I could be playing. But the thing about casual games is that they're designed to be played in short bursts just as much as they are in long stretches. They're the descendants of, say, Asteroids or Tetris and I still like to play those. I suspect this is one of those cases where my priorities have been all out of whack. An MMO like Star Trek Online might be fun for a bit but it's going to be horribly bloated and outdated in a few years. The real designers, the real pioneers of the craft of making video games might just be the ones concentrating on making simpler, smaller things that will stand the test of time. So, yeah, I want to shovel my money into PopCap because I can't wait to see what they'll come up with next if they realize Bookworm Adventures is a profitable model. And I think I'm going to have to keep an eye on the casual game industry as a whole because it's suddenly become very interesting to me.

In the meantime, I'm going to fire up the demo – again – and see if I can't beat my old high score again. I wish you all could join me but about the only thing this game is lacking is a multiplayer option.