Bejeweled 2+Blitz

Imagine a game that took pity on you. The game knew you were down on your luck, you didn’t really know what you were doing. That things weren’t working out with your new girlfriend and you felt you couldn’t relate to friends anymore and your self esteem was at an all time low. A game that would let you sleep with her win. After the mild exhileration you felt worse afterwards. Bejeweled 2+Blitz is such game.

For the initiated, Bejeweled 2+Blitz (fuck that name, from here on I’m just calling it Bejeweled) is a match 3 game. You have to match up three or more gems to remove them. Everything falls down and new gems arrive on top to replace the fallen ones. If that sounds familiar then that might be because you played Puzzle Quest or Jewel Quest or DS launch title and Pietriot favourite Zoo Keeper. If you’re a true alternative indie hipster gamer then you obviously would’ve played the original Shakiri on DOS back in 1994 before cloning sheep was a real technology. You may also think this sounds like Nintendo’s old Puzzle League franchise that gets rehashed for every platform, but here is the crucial difference: Puzzle League is fast paced and requires skill to chain together huge combos – but I’ll get into Bejeweled‘s bullshittery later, first we have to discuss the crime that is endless mode.

If there was ever any proof needed that flashing lights and colours could fascinate people, Bejeweled is it. Like many puzzle games, Bejeweled has an ‘endless’ mode. However, unlike Tetris or Puzzle League or whatever, where endless mode means your game will be uninterrupted and keep playing until you reach a lose condition such as filling up the screen, Bejeweled endless mode literally does not end. The game has no lose conditions and will carry on indefinitely through an infinite number of levels with no increase in difficulty, because there is no difficulty. The game will keep offering you moves to do and allow an unlimited number of hints. It is pure torture and yet, almost impossible to put down. I just picked up my saved endless game to take a few screenshots except that was half an hour ago! There is no challenge, there is no sense of accomplishment, there are only flashing lights. This is the kind of shit that could lead to mental disorders and the breakdown of our post-ironic economy. It wouldn’t matter if Bejeweled was a poverty stricken, unknown game, played only by the criminally insane, but it’s one of the best selling video game franchises in history, completely cornering the brainless female market. This, coupled with their promotions like the fact it was free on the App Store yesterday, how I acquired my copy, means that people who should be productive, functional members of society are throwing hours away on the most fruitless of video games created!

I think I was going to make this into more of a review where I talk about the broken mechanics of the game, postulate on the algorithm that keeps endless mode run for eternity or make disparaging comparisons against real puzzle games like Puzzle League but now I’m just too angry to continue! I haven’t even played Blitz mode, but I think that’s just so you can suffer with a friend. Too many bad memories keep flooding back from this game. Bejeweled 2+Blitz is like that pretty girlfriend you had that never put out or that game of cricket where you spent the whole time at the non-strikers end! It is a complete waste of money, but more importantly, it is a complete waste of time. Fucking Farmville is more rewarding than this shit. Fuck Bejeweled, fuck PopCap Games. FUCK ALL THINGS!