Trigger Happy
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
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