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Game Daze: 'Mighty Beanz Pocket Puzzle,' 'Super Collapse II'

Game Daze: 'Mighty Beanz Pocket Puzzle,' 'Super Collapse II'

'Mighty Beanz Pocket Puzzle'

Ah, bliss.

No doubt you've figured out by now that we check out quite a few video games around here, hop-scotching between titles and genres while we decide what to feature each week. We zip through racers and role-playing games, keep our wits in horror, strategy and action adventures and tussle with enemies from every imaginable galaxy and century, all while doing our part for educated consumerism.

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So what do we choose when it's our turn to play simply for fun, for ourselves alone? At our house, we turn to puzzles that tax our brains while we rush to match, then eliminate jewels or beans or geometric shapes before the clock runs out.

Forget wreaking mayhem or careening through space or embarking on never-ending medieval quests: Give us a fast-paced, never-ending challenge to get our juices flowing and clear our heads of stress. That's why we're so giddy over "Mighty Beanz," (Game Boy Advance; Majesco; $19.99; Rated Everyone) which brings a couple of new twists to familiar themes and puts them in a portable, car trip-friendly package to boot.

"Mighty Beanz" stars stamp-sized animated versions of toys that, of late, have been popular with both kiddies and grown-ups who troll for trends in collectibles. This one- or two-player GBA game chops the Beanz in half and shuffles them, then challenges you to find their mates and reassemble them before the screen fills up with still more discombobulated beans. Think playing "Columns" in a bowl of three-bean salad.

Special beans and power-ups are built in to help you rack up points and pummel opponents. There's a battle mode, too, to play and wager your rare beans against other GBA-equipped friends via link cable.

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At first glance, "Mighty Beanz" may strike you as child's play when compared to "Tetrus" or other venerable puzzle classics. But it's not as easy as you might think to flatten this hill of tiny beans, given that they're dressed in detailed garb and that you're racing the clock while trying to connect their individual lines and dots. Some of that detail is tough to spot, even on the GBA's lighted screen, until you start to recognize the Beanz's various traits.

Battle Mode, where you've got to move whole rows of beans up, down or sidewise to find matches, is particularly tricky. Even the cooler-than-thou teenager in our house was eventually drawn in by these leaping legumes and their wholesome contests -- and he didn't seem to miss the dark plots and shoot-'em-up action of his favorite RPGs one bit.

'Super Collapse II'

So what did it take to finally pull us away from the Beanz?

Another pint-sized puzzle package from Majesco, this time compressing the time-gobbling PC and Web game into a package meant for hand-held play (GBA; $19.99; Rated Everyone). Time was when you'd have to log off "Collapse" or "Super Collapse" eventually in order to eat dinner, catch a bus or go to bed. But this play-on-the-go version could be a dangerous thing for folks like us who, a game generation or two ago, gave ourselves over to this link-the-blocks contest.

For anyone who's never blown an afternoon on some version of "Collapse," the game requires you to find and click on groups of three or more matching blocks to make them disappear from the expanding grid of jewel-toned blocks on your screen. More and more blocks fall while you search for more groups to eliminate. If the screen fills up, you're done.

This new version offers easy or hard difficulty settings as well as four game modes to try. Start out with Classic Mode for a quick refresher, then move on to Relapse, in which both the bottom and top of the screen fill with blocks that inch toward each other while you struggle to keep them apart.

Strategy Mode tweaks the classic game, adapting it to turn-based play rather than a timed challenge. Puzzle Mode, too, eliminates the time element but requires you to pick off certain blocks to complete a mystery shape.

True, we could do without the tinny soundtrack. But the joy of "Super Collapse II" is that it's so darned consuming. Before long, you'll be focused on absolutely nothing else but the next row of falling blocks.

First Published: July 16, 2004, 4:00 a.m.

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