Trigger Happy
81
The 1980s curio Sentinel was an intriguing attempt at a
sort of three-dimensional, simplified chess: the player
had to negotiate a checkered landscape, avoiding the
immolating gaze of the sentinel, until he occupied the
higher ground, at which point the sentinel could be
defeated by having its energy sucked out. A superb, and
much simpler, concept is that of Bust-A-Move (also
known as Puzzle Bobble). Brightly colored bubbles
hang from the top of the screen; new ones are slowly
added. Your job is to fire bubbles at them in such a way
that three of the same color meet; they then burst, and
take any others that they were supporting with them.
But really, to understand puzzle games you only
need one word: Tetris. Created by a Soviet
mathematician, Alexei Pajitnov, Tetris became the
subject of a fascinating intercontinental copyright war
(detailed in David Sheff’s excellent
Game Over
), and
Nintendo’s acquisition of the handheld rights to the
game helped to sell thirty-two million Game Boys in
one year, 1992.
The game itself is viciously simple. It’s raining
blocks. Some are square, some sticky-outy, some long
and thin, some infuriatingly L-shaped. In some unreal
universe of fractional gravity, they float down the
