Connect the jewels.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone is not just a music device but also a game device. Many have released games for this platform to take advantage of the steadily growing number of users. Electronic Arts (EA) and PopCap Games bring one of their most popular games – Bejeweled; one of the most addicting games available today. This is how it is played.

Bejeweled shows a board that contains jewels of different shapes and colors. The object of the game is to connect three jewels of the same color whether it is on a row or column. You can do this by choosing two jewels: one jewel and an adjacent which you would like to switch places with. Then, the jewels will switch places hoping that it can connect with other jewels and form three jewels of the same color. When you do, the jewels disappear and lets the jewels above it fall down to the level at the bottom of it. Imagine a stack of boxes and you yank out one. This falls down one level lower. A score is given to you. This makes you steps closer to your goal – to reach a score limit to go to the next level.

Now, Bejeweled gives you more points if you combine four jewels or if you mix a connection of vertical and horizontal jewels. There are certain times when your jewels become explosive bombs which you can set off to destroy the surrounding jewels and make way for new ones. Also, you are given a special orb when you connect five jewels in one turn. This special orb can make any color you chose to disappear from the roster of jewels on the screen. And then gravity takes over.

As the jewels drop, there are possibilities that the jewels will form at least a series of three connected jewels. This gives you additional bonus points.

Choose from the menu.

The Bejeweled game ends when there are no more jewels to be connected.

You have two modes of play for Bejeweled: Classic and Action. For the Classic, it is the normal game play. For the Action, there is a timer and you need to connect as much jewels as possible for the timer not to expire.

This is one of my most personal favorite games especially when you play it on the Apple Mac OSX version. The graphics, the sound and the fluidity of the animation is truly awesome. This is a very addicting game. It can bring hours of fun as you play with it continuously.

However, the same fluidity, animation and experience of Bejeweled on the desktop were not brought into the Nokia 5800 version. The jewels are pixilated. The fluidity is clunky. The sounds are just sound bytes and never a continuous playing feature such as the desktop version. The response time is not as active as I hoped it would be. Also, the five jewel-in-a-row feature with the power orb does not work nor do the exploding jewels. I wonder why they excluded that. You can still play a decent game but it is not the same compared to the original Bejeweled version.

This is such a disappointment to me simply because the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone has tremendous potential to have a similar experience to the desktop version. Electronic Arts and PopCap Games could have figured out better ways to bring this soon-to-be classic and addicting game to the Symbian. I am hoping that they can figure out a way to make the Bejeweled game much better than it is now.

You can check out Bejeweled for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone at the PopCap website found here.

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