A to Z Challenge: Zuma's Revenge

 As the last A to Z Challenge entry for this year I'm going with an obscure little game I got for free from Origin like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 called Zuma's Revenge.  Besides Frogger, it might be the second-most popular video game featuring a frog that isn't Kermit.

The main character of the game is a frog who has to battle some kind of Tiki god thing on a Polynesian island.  Basically there are different maps with balls (or stones) of different colors forming chains around the maps.  Your goal is to shoot colored balls at the balls on the screen to match the colors.  When you get 3 or more of a color, that part of the chain disappears.  You have to destroy all the balls before any of them reach the skull at the end of the level.  Make sense?  No?  Good!

For a silly game there is of course a lot of difficulty to it.  First is that you get different balls at random in the frog's mouth.  You can select between two different ones but that's it.  So if there's no chain on the screen with the color in your mouth, you have to shoot it to the end or another spot and hope you can take care of it later.  But the chains get longer and move faster to make it harder and harder.  Like Tetris you can end up with a chain-reaction that quickly leads to defeat.  In some later levels you get two different chains and if a ball from either one touches a skull, you're done.  In some of those levels you get two rocks to shoot from so you have to keep hopping from one to the other in order to get everything.

Besides just the balls of red, green, yellow, blue, and maybe other colors, there are sometimes different power-up balls that you can shoot that will explode a bunch or explode a certain color or things like that.  When you blow up part of the chain in the middle, it'll separate it into two (or more) pieces.  The front will stop but the back will keep moving until everything is reunited.  That can buy you some time to destroy everything.  When the game says, "Zuma!" that means there are no new balls being added to chain and you only have to deal with what's left.

There is a campaign (or adventure) mode that I beat a couple of times on the easier level.  The adventure mode features a boss battle at the end of every group of levels.  There are also some challenges that I never completed.

Like a lot of silly games, it was pretty fun to while away some time when I didn't feel like doing anything else.   On Retrogames there's a Nintendo DS version and on Amazon (probably other retailers) you can buy XBox 360 and Windows versions, many bundled with other games.

That concludes the A to Z Challenge...until May 15th when I scheduled the Reflections entry.  Thanks to everyone who commented--double thanks if you actually read something!