Back in November, before I got my Wii U, there were two games I was working on: Superfly DX for Jaguar CD and Word Zap for Game Boy. I finished up and reviewed Superfly DX, but Word Zap got put on the backburner. I finally got back to it in the past few days. It’s a decent word game with two main modes. The Word Zap mode gives you eight random letters on the left half of the screen. You have to find seven words (3-5 letters long) before your opponent does. It supports the link cable for two-player competition, but you can also play against the computer. If you and your opponent enter the same word, that word is zapped (thus the name) and removed from both of your lists.
You can adjust settings such as difficulty, whether plurals are allowed or not, and the background music.
The other game mode, WordHai, is purely a single-player game. If the name looks weird, it’s because it’s a combination of “word” and “Shanghai.” Shanghai is a version of mahjong solitaire–a Chinese tile game in which you match tiles by only removing tiles from the outer edges. Likewise, WordHai only lets you use letters at the outer edges of a grid to make words. In the following picture, you can see that the unusable letters are in a darker shade.
To clear a level, you must use all of the letters on the left, as you make words on the right. As you choose a letter, it is removed from the left, freeing up another letter. For example, in the picture above, if you chose the A in the top row, the D would then become available. So you could use “ado” as the next word if you chose.
WordHai also has settings which you can adjust. The “challenge play” mode has a level structure, in which you must clear 24 levels. After each four levels, you are shown an animation of a famous landmark blasting off into space. This mode may take a few hours to complete, especially as the later levels get more challenging. But curiously, there is no password feature to save and resume your game; it must be done all in one sitting. Not a good idea for a portable system that has a limited battery life.
You can expect a review of Word Zap on JVGS soon. I’ve taken an unintentional break from Earthbound, but I plan on getting back to it soon.
In other news, Ubisoft has responded to criticism over the Rayman Legends delay by announcing they will offer Wii U gamers a new, exclusive demo of the game. I don’t think that’s going to be much consolation for people who were all set to buy the game this month.
This whole Rayman Legends thing (getting delayed so it can go multiplatform) is actually quite similar to what happened with the very first Rayman game. Rayman, believe it or not, was originally supposed to be exclusive to the Atari Jaguar. But it then got delayed as Ubisoft announced plans to also bring it to Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and PC. The Jaguar and PlayStation versions ended up being released around the same time. There were rumors Sony paid Ubisoft off to get the game on their system at (approximately) the same time. We may never know the truth, but it does seem odd that a game that had been development for a long time on Jaguar ended up being released virtually at the same time as a PlayStation version that seemingly came out of nowhere.
