I spent a lot of time the past few days with the PlaySega games, in theory play testing for bugs and such. As it turned out I spent a disproportionate amount of time “bug-checking” Ice Shuffle and Aquatic Word Burst.

Let’s start with Ice Shuffle, and specifically the music for Ice Shuffle: it’s a pleasant, catchy little tune, one that instantly recalls 8-bit gaming sessions, where the same few hypnotic bars of a game’s music hum over and over in your head while you dedicate yourself to some insane task (in this case, blasting pucks around an obstacle course), hunched over a monitor until all of a sudden it’s 2 in the morning and you were supposed to be play testing the new PlaySega site. Dang.

What’s cool about Ice Shuffle is it gives you the chance to play any way you like—getting through the levels, especially some of the later ones, is a fun challenge that requires some clever use of angles, momentum, and, um, luck. If you’re the obsessive type, then you can replay levels as many times as you want for maximum points, something I have italicized to indicate how truly awesome it is. I like getting maximum points in anything. Getting a massive score and making the tough decision to drop that score to try for an even more maximum score appeals to me on a very primal level.

Allegedly, Ice Shuffle is a kind of version of Curling, but all I know is that it invokes the same frictionless physics that made games like the NHL series so appealing, where objects zoom around on a pleasant, gleaming surface at unnatural speeds. Lowering friction coefficients in video game physics is a move that says now we are having fun!

Also, the last 3 levels of Ice Shuffle are some nasty inventions indeed (see the above image). I literally had to pry myself away in order to move on to Aquatic Word Blast.

In Aquatic Word Burst, a large green fish encourages you to form as many word combinations as you can from 6 available letters. The “casual mode” is untimed, and you earn fewer points for playing that way; the “challenge mode” is timed, and you have to get a certain number of words each round in order to proceed. Both are fun, but it would be dishonest to say that I really tried the “casual” mode. I like to know that my ability to cull words from random letters is being matched against a ticking clock. Also, if you want to get all the words on a given level, you will invariably need to learn words such as “bight” and “Mahout”.

If you don’t love word games like Boggle or Scrabble this probably won’t appeal to you—but these games appeal to me on a very primal level. I was only able to tear myself away from Aquatic Word Blast to go back to, um, Ice Shuffle. Arranging all 6 letters into a satisfying word (Fracas! Devout!) scratches the same itch that, say, a headshot in a First Person Shooter satisfies.

Incidentally: A “Mahout” is “the keeper and driver of an elephant, particularly in India or the East Indies”. So that’s kind of awesome.

-Edward