Spin Jam Preview

The puzzle-game genre hasn't seen a whole lot of action lately; as most gamers are tired of the same old puzzle elements being slapped into clone game after clone game. While it doesn't have a completely original premise, Spin Jam at least brings something new to the table. If you like cutesy characters and exploding colored balls, Spin Jam is for you.

Similar to Bust-a-Move, Spin Jam has you matching like-colored balls to eliminate them from the playing field. You'll launch said balls from a fixed catapult at the bottom of the screen onto a circular plate in the middle of the screen. To aim your shots you'll rotate the plate, causing the whole playing field to move as you do so. As balls are eliminated from the playing field they'll cause any balls opposite them to shoot off the plate. The object is to shoot these balls into like-colored targets, eliminating that target. Once you've eliminated all the targets, you progress to the next level. Miss a target, however, and the ball falls back to your plate. Balls that leave the plate's diameter turn gray and eventually infect neighboring balls. Once the gray "virus" reaches the middle of your plate, the game ends. You can prevent this by launching the gray balls off your plate.

Spin Jam has several different play modes. There's an arcade mode that simply puts you in a never-ending sequence of levels, and there's a time trial, a two-player battle mode, and a story mode. The story mode focuses on your selected character and reveals his story throughout the course of the game. The story mode features exclusive levels and backgrounds not found in other modes.

The game features nine different selectable characters, each one dripping with cuteness. There's Booger, the green Day-Glo bunny, who harvests radioactive carrots; Poppy, the blue-haired chick with boxing gloves; and Nips the cat, just to name a few. The characters will stand in the bottom left corner of the screen and react to how well you're playing.

The graphics in Spin Jam seem to be standard puzzle-game fare. The level backgrounds are simple and make good use of color. Unfortunately, a few of the balls are extremely similar in color, resulting in some misplaced shots. We weren't able to see any of the story mode's exclusive levels, but we assume they'll be more exciting than the levels found in the arcade mode. The game's music is rather repetitive, and the sound effects are mediocre at best - hopefully, Empire Interactive will have beefed up the game's audio by the time Spin Jam ships.

While the basic puzzle element brings some nice innovations on the classic colored-ball shooting puzzle formula, the game still needs some tweaking. But Empire should have plenty of time to get things right, as Spin Jam is scheduled to release in the third quarter of this year.