Cropped Out, by Clickgamer
Technologies, $9.95
Reviewed December 2002
How many Bejeweled clones can you take?
For a fan of this fast pace sliding genre, the answer is
as many as you can get so long as the games have a creative
design and attractive graphics. Cropped Out can be qualified
as having both. The game tiles are made of those images of
mysterious crop circles left behind by aliens. The game play
is much like Bejeweled except you will have one more direction
to slide your tiles: diagonal! For the Bejeweled/Diamond
Mine fanatics, this game has got to be a whole new world.
Just like Bejeweled, there are two game
modes in Cropped Out, Timed Mode and Easy Mode. In the Timed
Mode, you race against the clock. The more links you make
the higher your score. When there aren’t any moves,
the Alien Ship will come down and provide you with more crop
circles. The Easy Mode has no time limit, but if you run
out moves the game is over. You will see little green Alien
heads popping out from your regular tiles if you wait for
too long to make the move. You can crunch them by taking
away the tiles underneath these green heads. You will use
stylus to swap tiles to form a link with at least 3 similar
crop images. For the Bejeweled fans, it might take a while
to get used to the diagonal moves. Once you master it, it
might be harder to go back to Bejeweled.
The graphics are built around the crop
circle idea with an Alien UFO producing the strange circles
and particle effects that look very SiFi. There are 8 crop
circle tile designs with 3 skin color themes. You can change
the skin color anytime in the game. The particle effects
when the circles disappear and other animations in the game
will attract gamers who enjoy eye candy. You will find some
useful shortcut buttons such as battery meter, sound on/off,
stop and pause buttons as well as a menu bar at the bottom
of the game screen.
The sound effects are plentiful and well
suited to the game theme. Even though there are no background
music tracks, you won’t find empty audio moments and
every sound FX is well designed to enhance the visual. In
the Snowed In edition, pieces of Christmas music have been
added. The game will run on any Pocket PC with ARM or Xscale
processor. It takes about 2MB of memory.
The game engine seems well suited
for quick add-on packs shown by the quick release of Snowed
In, a free game in time for Christmas. The images of crop
circles have been replaced with Christmas trees, reindeer
and such, and the sound effects changed from SiFi to jingle
bells. Cropped Out is a worthy rendition of the addictive
classic and added game developer’s own interpretation.
Check it out and get ready to get hooked again! |
