Recently, Candy crush saga is a common top search phrases on internet. It is the most popular game on Facebook, with 46 million average monthly users, and it also stands on Top downloaded App on the App Store.
So, it’s fairly widely believed that King, creators of Candy Crush Saga, don’t seem a very lovely lot. In fact, last week brought news of some alleged actions that are deeply unsavory (geddit?), as the creator of Candy Swipe revealed the extent to which King are apparently going to make his game – made in tribute to his late mother – go away. A game that, while not a match-3, happens to have a lot in common with Candy Crush Saga, only it came out two years before King’s own. This follows unpleasant behavior toward Stoic and The Banner Saga, and their attempts to trademark basic English words and use this to legally threaten other developers. So, all in all, yeah, possibly not a company you’d want over for dinner.
Bearing all this in mind, it would seem rather nice if an enormous number of people were to stop playing their games, if you ask me. But of course, a lot of CCS players aren’t going to be RPS readers, but rather your mum or dad, cousin, colleague or friend, and maybe they’d be less keen to play if they knew who made it. Maybe you are too. So, with this in mind, below are my suggestions for games to play instead.
Bejeweled 3
The origins of the match-3 game aren’t entirely clear. You can argue it goes back to ChainShot!/SameGame in 1985, and then evolves via the likes of Puzznic, and then Magic Jewelry in 1990. Tetris Attack brought in the tile swapping in 1995, as did Russian made Shariki, and at that point you can call it a match-3 as we understand it today. 2000-ish saw Super Collapse! sneak in just before it went big. However, it was in 2001 that Popcap’s Bejeweled made it a household concept. Bejeweled went huge. In 2010 it was reported that it had sold 50 million copies.
The original Bejeweled is a very purist interpretation of the Match-3 game, lacking in Candy Crush’s sense of “journey”, and with fewer tasks to perform along the way. However, since PopCap was bought by EA, they don’t seem to acknowledge it any more. There’s a version called “Bejeweled” only available on iThings on their website, but it’s not the original. In 2004 came Bejeweled 2, but that has also been wiped from their history, creating the rather strange result of only Bejeweled 3 being boasted of on their own site.
Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 are still available on Steam, in their Deluxe form, although both are currently a rather unreleastic £7. Bejeweled 3 is an eye-watering £15, for a genre that’s mostly freemium in 2014. The new iOS Bejeweled is indeed freemium, as is the 60 second version of the game, Bejeweled Blitz, which also graces Android with an appearance.
And then there’s Bejeweled Blitz, which is the EAist incarnation yet, a fully monetised version of Bejeweled which is able to make boasts like, “Get up to 50% off Kanga Ruby Rare Gem harvests in the wild,” on its store page. “New users get 100,000 coins free,” it adds.
Source: freebejeweled2games.yolasite.com
