The color choices and graphic design of the screens all seem very well thought out and nicely laid out. The special bonus marbles, which contain animations, are exquisite. A variety of textured backgrounds are available for the playing field, and the 3D multicolored marbles themselves are quite pretty. The graphics in the game are quite well done, given the game's requirements. Third, it would have been nice (and not very difficult) if you could have chosen among several sets of marbles to play with, but instead you are always faced with the same ones. Second, you can chose your starting game board only in practice mode or two-player mode, not in single player mode-this handicap is not only aesthetic, but also affects the availability of the special bonus marbles. First, there is no ability to save games, so if you made it through a number of rounds and have to quit, you have to start all over again. These bonus marbles are not always easy to come by, but they do add considerable spice and strategy to the game.ĭespite its overall success, the game design has a few shortcomings. You may also accumulate bonus marbles - named chain, column, and refugee - at various points in the game that have special properties to aid you in losing your marbles. These bonus rounds are incredibly difficult and not nearly as much fun as the regular rounds. You complete a number of rounds in each of several levels (each level has a different game board background), and after completing a level in single player mode you face a bonus round in which you have to eliminate as many marbles as possible in a specified time period. You may play at three levels of skill, with the highest making the game even more intense and fast-paced. You can play in single player mode against the computer, in two-player mode using the same keyboard, or against another player using a LAN. You can play with quite intuitive controls using the keyboard or the mouse, but I find that given all the movement involves vertical and horizontal shifts, the keyboard is preferable (this is decidedly not the kind of game where a game pad or joystick is particularly useful). The gameplay in Lose Your Marbles is fast and furious, with more going on at any moment than in other games of this type. While many games have emerged since Tetris that have players try to get objects of the same color or shape positioned together, Lose Your Marbles appears to be the best of the lot.
LOSE YOUR MARBLES GAME FULL
You win when the opponent's play area is full of marbles. Once you do so, they disappear (sometimes dumping marbles on your opponent), but more and more marbles keep dropping down from the top. You may move your rows of marbles up or down, or move a specially designated "pitch line" from right to left, in order to get 3, 4, or 5 similarly-colored marbles in an unbroken horizontal array. The goal of Lose Your Marbles (which is quite aptly named) is to get rid of all your marbles as fast as you can. Lose Your Marbles has even more a sense of frenzied fun than Tetris, including a greater multiplayer orientation, and SegaSoft's pledge to refund your money if you do not find Lose Your Marbles better than Tetris is not likely to find many takers. It showed the virtues of 256-color VGA graphics and of 8-bit monaural sound in a pleasurable game environment. People seem to forget that the reasons for this game's success included not only that it could be played only on the computer (because of the animation involved) but also - most importantly - that it utilized state-of-the-art graphics and sound for the time.
The release of Tetris in the late 1980s was of course the watershed for puzzle games that could really take advantage of the computer's unique capabilities. While puzzle games in recent years have included arcade action, colorful visuals and bouncy music, they tend to have a simpler and more restrained appeal than action games, war games, strategy games, adventure games or sports games. As a result, in recent months there have been very few commercial releases of puzzle games, with notable exceptions being Actual Entertainment's Gubble and Microsoft's Puzzle Collection.
Force-feedback joysticks, 3D-card accelerated graphics, and Dolby surround sound are of little use in this kind of game. In the recent rush to use the very latest video, audio, and input technology in designing computer games, puzzle games alone appear to have been left behind.