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PRODUCT REVIEW
Let Alphamania challenge your brain
By Jen Edwards
Do you like word games? I mean, really like them? Are you standing on the porch when the paperboy comes by so that you don't have to wait a single extra second for the day's crossword puzzle? Are you a compulsive Scrabble player? Do you have the list of legal two-letter Scrabble words memorized? Is playing Boggle or UpWords on a Friday night your idea of a really good time? If your answer to any one of these questions is yes, then you really need to try Alphamania for your Palm OS handheld (at http://www.quantumclockwork.net/alphamania/palm.html). Figure A shows what you're getting yourself into with this game.
FIGURE A
Here's the beginning of an Alphamania puzzle.
I'll warn you though, this game is hard, and it's seriously addicting. I must admit that I didn't answer yes to any of the questions above, but I can't seem to stop playing this game. The premise is quite simple, and if you've ever played the freeware Windows classic called Tetravex, you already know how to play. In Tetravex you have to line up numbered blocks so that their sides match each other; in Alphamania you're required to line up the 16 individual letter blocks in a grid so that there's a four-letter word in each row and column. And believe you me, it's challenging. Figure B shows you how your game will progress as you fit the letters into their spaces.
FIGURE B
One row has been completed.
Figure C shows one interlocking row and column done, but where do all those other letters go?
FIGURE C
One interlocking row and column are done.
Fortunately, there's a fully implemented cheating-er, hint system included, as I've shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
Here's the Hint menu.
If you get really stuck, just ask for a hint, and the game will obligingly place one of the letter tiles in its proper place for you. You can also choose to get a hint that fills in each order of the puzzle grid, which is sure to give you a great start. It's also a good thing that the game includes status indicators, so you can be sure when a word is correctly spelled. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that all the letters are in the right place to solve the entire puzzle. Oh, and did I forget to mention that all this is timed? You have to be both clever and quick to do well in this game.
There are a lot of nice little extras in this game that show it to be very well thought out. There's a high score table, so you can keep track of your fastest puzzle solving times-it also displays the number of hints you needed to figure each puzzle out. You can beam puzzles to your friends, for example, and it's also possible to download additional puzzle collections from the Alphamania Web site (at http://www.quantumclockwork.net/alphamania/palm.html). It's a great bargain too, at only $10 for registration. That gives you access to over 100,000 puzzles. This is shareware though, so if you just want to try the game out before you commit, you can get 10 unique puzzles in the trial version.
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