Thanks, Frenzic. I may never be able to look at pie charts again. I’m not sure I’ve found a game this addicting since my friends and I whiled away our sophomore year of college playing MacBrickout. We should have petitioned to have that factored into our GPA.
What makes Frenzic so entrancing is, like most puzzle games, the utter simplicity of its rules. The board has six circles; your goal is to fill each with six wedges (think Trivial Pursuit pieces). Wedges will be presented to you one at a time in one of three different colors: orange, green, and purple. You can fill a circle with wedges of any color, but here’s the tricky part: filling a circle with wedges of all one color will net you more points and an extra “life.” You can lose a life by not assigning a wedge to a circle before the timer runs out. There are also three “power-ups” which you can acquire by filling a certain circle with one color wedge. The game ends when you lose all of your lives. So far, the longest I’ve managed to survive is around six and a half minutes.
That’s it. Frenzic’s design is simple but slick, no surprise as it comes from a collaboration between game maker ARTIS Software and the design gurus at Iconfactory. Frenzic’s $14.95 for the game, which includes a year of access to the online score tracking; $24.95 will get you online access forever (renewing the access every year otherwise costs $9.95). You can download the demo and try it out before buying, but I’ve warned you before: puzzle games are dangerous.
I just did a quick eval to see if I wanted to write about it, and in my first (and so far only) game I lasted eight minutes, fifty-two seconds.
And I'm old and on heart meds. :-P
Damn you!
It was a few days before I downloaded and tried the game after reading your review. I was immediately hooked. It took just two days worth of playing before my wife and I (taking turns) ran out of the hour of play time. I bought it last night.