Game du Jour is a "One Deal a Day" website for casual PC games. Every day of the week, GameDuJour.com sells one downloadable game at a steep discount.
Every week Blogcritics Magazine will bring you a preview of those games, so you know what to expect when the featured game gets its 24 hours in the spotlight.
This Week's Deals
02/09/2007 Funky Farm — 60% discount
02/10/2007 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — 50% discount
02/11/2007 Cramgene — 50% discount
To kick things off, we have a review of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that will only be featured this Saturday, February 10.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Written by Aaman Lamba
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a game from Grey Alien Games that uses the classic tale as a backdrop for a game of matching cubes. That simple description belies an entertaining quest with slick graphics and sound.
The opening scene shows a twister knocking the Kent house off its little Kansas plot, I mean, the Dorothy house. The menu interface is very child-friendly, and my four-year old had entered his name, figured out that he needed to click the big button marked "Play" below the image of a classic book called "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," and he was off to see the Wizard.
The quest is divided into chapters, drawn from the book, and each having five 'pages.' A page begins with an excerpt from the book and then the game board is shown, with increasing degrees of complexity. On the board, one finds an increasingly complex pattern of colored blocks, many of them holding little Munchkins. Your task is to match blocks of the same color and shape in groups of three or more. Every time you match a set, it vanishes, and if the block in the set contains Munchkins, they jump down and run away, with the occasional call "I'm Free." Some blocks can affect others in magical ways. Thus, for example, a lion block wipes out its neighbors, while a key block unlocks a lock block.
The user interface is very smooth, and I discovered after a couple of boards that I did not need to click one block and then click the adjacent block to swap them. Merely clicking the first and dragging it in the direction I chose was sufficient to swap them if the move was allowed. At the beginning, a board has most of the blocks on bricks, not yellow ones, and every time you match a set, the bricks under that set disappear. As you match sets, more blocks drop from the top to replace them. Once all the bricks have been erased, the board ends and you advance a wee bit further down the yellow brick road.
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