Geek-Culture News
The Puzzle Chasers, Frogger Pinball, casual games at E3?
Posted 3:31 am on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 by Ryan Southard
Truth be told, I don’t walk into E3 wondering how many casual games I can get my hands on in the small amount of time allowed. If I can help it, I’ll avoid as many of them as I can while speed-walking to all of the games that I’ve been anticipating for months or years. Having a booth tour at Konami, my mind was obviously focused on Metal Gear Rising: Reveangance. We politely said yes to a full tour of Konami’s E3 offerings, knowing full well there were casual games involved.
The Puzzle Chasers was one of the games shown to us. It’s essentially a socially connected puzzle game that allows you to “level up” by performing well in puzzles. The “level up” feature will net you access to more challenging puzzles, and give you items that you can place in your world. Your world is something similar to what you would see in a Sims game. As for the puzzle game itself, it basically presents you with a half-finished puzzle, asking that you solve the rest. Rather than making players fiddle around with puzzle pieces, and manually trying to insert them in the correct position, the game shows you which piece needs to be solved next. Then you look at the pieces laid out on the bottom (around 6-8 pieces, though this number changes), and select the right piece. It’s fairly simple, but because of that, you’re very limited on the amount of time you have. Is it a casual experience? Sure, but that sort of game is perfect for Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t a terrible experience like I too often imagine. Puzzle Chasers is now available on Facebook.
The other game I tried out was Frogger Pinball. Now, I didn’t have as much fun with this one, but maybe it’s because I’m not a huge fan of pinball. I’ll play a pinball game if there’s nothing else around, and maybe I’ll enjoy it, but it’s not my first choice for entertainment. Having said that, it did seem like a good quality pinball game that’s worth checking out if that’s what flips your paddles. The key interesting game element I found in it, based on my brief hands-on demo, was that objects such as flying helicopters will fly around the playing field, and if you happen to hit all of them, you can extend your time. Frogger Pinball can be found on Facebook, or purchased for $1.99 for your iOS device.
I spent a little bit of time not playing AAA blockbusters, and everything turned out fine. Having been a gamer for a long time, I can’t say that I’ll be turning to casual games anytime soon. However, it is nice to see casual games that have some quality injected into them.
