Bust your brain! Rack your head! Puzzles are here!
Or something like that. Smart Games has released a title composed of their favorite word puzzles. Forget about the marble jumping and the little red car moving from Challenge #1; this game is strictly about verbiage and the various ways you can contort it. And, for the most part, it works.
The game is good. Because replaying a word puzzle is about as dull as dull can be - crosswords just aren't any fun the second time around - a word puzzle package needs to have a very large number of puzzles to keep puzzlers happy. Smart Games does. With 99 scanagrams (those jumbo scramble things) and almost as many crosswords, word searches, and word melts (change the beginning word into the end word in as few moves as possible, with several restrictions), there are enough puzzles to keep you entertained for quite some time. And the puzzles have been slightly re-vamped: Harder word searches give clues to the word to be searched, instead of just the word itself, and you get to design the actual crossword.
The whole thing is set up like a game show, right down to the campy, Dick-Clark-meets-Alex-Trebek-y music. A running tally keeps track of the points you earn in each of the four categories, a window displays the high score for each puzzle you're trying to beat, and you're reminded to post your high scores (when you get them - which isn't rare because few scores have been posted) on the Smart Games web site.
What is severely lacking in this game is answers - and cheating is way too complicated. You see, some people occasionally like to cheat. They can't figure out the answer, are completely stumped, and want a little hint, just to get them going. And the point of cheating is instant gratification. So they turn the page of the crossword, check the back of the book, possibly confer with a roommate who's already completed the same puzzle in her New York Times, get the hint, and finish up the puzzle.
But when you play Smart Games word puzzles, cheating becomes an annoying exercise in patience. The game directs you to the Smart Games web site for answers - a reasonable enough proposition. However, the answers aren't there, because that part of the site isn't working yet. But if you'll kindly e-mail them your request, they'll send you the answer you're looking for…later. Much, much later. Like the next day. And that urge for instant gratification? Thwarted. Frustrated. Argh. But it could be said that that's what a good word puzzle is really supposed to do - tease and tantalize, thwart and frustrate. And eventually get solved, cheating or no.
(Editor's Addendum: The Smart Games web site is now operational, so the stumped among you will no longer have to wait for graitification.)
