Reviews

WordPop!

March 31, 2004

WordPop! is the second game from Smart Box Design, and it’s a lot of fun. It resembles Boggle in some ways, in that you are faced with a 6x6 grid of letter tiles and must make words out of those tiles. Each time you make a word, those letter tiles disappear. And you can only use adjacent tiles, which means that the letters in each word you make must touch each other. Sounds easy enough, but there’s quite a bit of strategy involved. Scoring is based on the sum of the tile points (shown by each letter), multiplied by the number of tiles used in the word. Not only do you have to think carefully about the words you want to make, in order to maximize your score, you also have to be concerned with making sure that you use ALL of the tiles—that’s the only way to advance to the next level of the game.

Fortunately there are three difficulty levels, and you do earn bonus tiles as you go along. See the box on the right in the screen shot? That’s where the bonus tiles come in, and you earn them by getting a minimum score on a particular word. In the easy level, that’s 40 points, the medium level requires 50 points, and the hard level requires 60 points per tile. On the easy level, they all tend to be blank, so you can use them as any letter you happen to need at the time. On higher difficulty levels you’re more likely to get a specific letter. When you want to use one, just tap on it and then tap on the empty grid square that you want to put the tile in so that you can make a word.

When you run out of words that can be created, there still might be a chance to finish the round— there’s a small button on the right side, just above the “enter” arrow button. Tap that button and the playing field is rotated, making the letter tiles fall into slightly different combinations. That doesn’t solve all problems though, as no matter how I rotate the playing field I don’t always get the combination I want. If you give up, you can tap the very small “x” button at the top right side of the bonus tile box to end the game. You’ll be asked to enter your name if you have a new high score, and you’ll also be shown a list of the best words that you played.

No cheating allowed either— the application includes a word list of 28,000 entries, and you can create words of up to seven letters. If you want to make longer words of up to 24 letters, you can install the optional SBD Word List, which has 80,000 entries. It is frequently updated, and contains nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The latest version of WordPop! also allows the supplemental word list to be installed to a memory card in order to save RAM on the handheld device.

WordPop! is really fun and quite addictive. It’s a good value, at $14.95, and has beautiful graphics. I’m a bit disappointed though, at the lack of sound effects. That’s great if you want to sneak in a few games during a boring meeting, but considering the overall polish of the game the absence of sound is a bit surprising. WordPop! requires 650K on your Palm OS device, plus an additional 527K if you choose to install the optional expanded word list. You can get a free trial at the Smart Box Design web site. Enjoy!

PocketGoddess Rating for WordPop!:

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