Bedazzled by Bejeweled 3

Bejeweled. The name of the game is legendary among casual game players. Even your Grandma knows about Bejeweled. When it first debuted in 2001, businesses around the world felt a severe dip in productivity as their workers couldn’t resist the oddly addictive game mechanic of matching three colored gems together, watching them disappear, and having the board rearrange. The game has been downloaded more than half a billion (!) times and more than 75 million copies have been sold. Yoicks.

Bejeweled 2 made its debut on Xbox LIVE way back in 2005 and while it had all the great traditional gameplay, it is perhaps more famous for its brutal and near-impossible achievements. Bejeweled Blitz LIVE, released earlier this year, featured a one-minute blitzkrieg version of the game perfect for those who tend to guzzle energy drinks and for whom caffeine is a barbiturate.
And now we have Bejeweled 3 releasing October 19 for 1200 Microsoft Points. So what do you do to gussy up an iconic match-3 game? You create new game modes, and provide lots of incentives and rewards. The game starts out with four game modes: Classic, Lightning, Zen, and Quest. Classic mode is the traditional untimed Bejeweled game, the perfect option for when you don’t want to be pressured or rushed but just want to play. If you love the adrenaline, then try Lightning mode where you must make as many matches as possible in sixty seconds (basically the concept behind Bejeweled Blitz LIVE).

Come down from that experience with Zen Mode, the endless version of the game which is meant to be relaxing, but you’ll still be trying to score major points and creating hypercubes anyway. The last basic game mode is Quest, where you attempt different mini-game challenges to acquire gems and release relics. For instance, the first four quests are: match 15 butterflies before the spider eats them, dig for five nuggets of gold before the time runs out, turn the entire grid to gold before time runs out, and match 120 gems in 20 moves or less. What??! I hear you say: Butterflies? Gold nuggets? Yep, those come from the “Secret” game modes.

There are four new game modes that are unlocked by completing certain tasks in the regular game modes:

• Butterflies: With each move made on-screen, a colored butterfly appears at the bottom of the grid. Every move made, the butterfly moves up one row of the grid. If it reaches the top, a spider eats it. Match the butterfly to two gems of the same color to make it disappear.
• Diamond Mine: You have a minute and a half to make matches along the bottom row of the grid. Each match blows up a chunk of ground, sometimes uncovering gold nuggets or other treasure. Clear the area and you go down another level. Dig to the 200-foot mark for an achievement.
• Ice Storm: Columns of ice rise from the bottom of the grid to the top. Once there, they take a few seconds to freeze solid but if they do, the game is over. Make matches within the columns to decrease the ice level. Making vertical matches in a column destroys the ice column entirely. The ice never stops though making this a rather frantic game mode.
• Poker: This is a tricky little game mode where you make poker hands out of your matches. For instance, match two different sets of three green gems together and that gives you a pair. Match three different sets of one color and two sets of another color for a full house. The board doesn’t completely reset after you score a hand so sometimes you can set up a good hand down the road. Skulls occasionally appear preventing you from scoring a particular hand, such as blocking out a pair. Score a pair and the skull randomly decides whether you lose or continue. Avoiding the blocked out hand eventually kills off the skull.

These new game modes are simple in concept, but force you to consider your normal Bejeweled strategies in a different way. Butterflies and Diamond Mine are especially fun (still stuck at the 160-foot mark in the latter). But in order to keep you playing through those new game modes, Bejeweled 3 offers up a two-tier reward system, with both the standard Xbox LIVE achievements and in-game badges that are awarded for skillful play. There are 15 common badges to earn, each of which comes in bronze, silver, gold, and platinum levels. There are also 5 elite badges for the truly difficult challenges (such as finishing Quest Mode). If you’re a perfectionist, you’ll be doing lots of practice (and grinding) to get all the badges at least up to gold (where you earn an achievement) and to reach Level 40 which earns you an elite badge.
There is tons of great gameplay in Bejeweled 3. It’s easy to learn, as even the new game modes are fairly simple in concept. But it’s going to be tough to max out your achievements on this one. This is also the kind of game that’s just perfect for the newcomer to video games. Grandma will be more than happy with the new developments but so will any lover of puzzle and match-3 games. Check out the demo on Xbox LIVE Marketplace October 19.

import from: http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/b/community_blog/archive/2011/10/18/bedazzled-by-bejeweled-3.aspx