A while ago I downloaded a game called “Candy Crush Saga” to my iPad. It was featured in the App Store and free so I figured I’d give it a whirl. I download featured games from the App Store all the time but usually play them briefly and toss them aside. This would not be one of those times.
The premise of Candy Crush Saga is a simple one. You match pieces of candy on a grid to score points. It’s like any other Bejeweled-esque game that has come along since that one took the world by storm. I wasn’t a bejeweled fan. I found it boring and spent more of my time playing Family Feud online. Don’t you judge me.
I fired up Candy Crush Saga and played the first few levels. Simple enough, really. You are a kid travelling a Candyland-like path completing level after level in an attempt to help the sad resident of Diabetes Meadows (not official, but I don’t know what else to call it) get their jellybeans or chocolate or sprinkles or whatever the hell it is they want back. Cute, easy, probably not long for my iPad.
What I didn’t know at the time was that it was the free rock the dealer gives you to get you hooked. Soon after the first level things begin to change a bit.
Suddenly you had goals. “Score a certain amount of points in a certain amount of seconds” was the easiest of the bunch. A theme that soon began to repeat to the point that I almost uninstalled it was “Clear all the jelly”. On these levels, pieces of candy are caught in a gelatinous ooze that will break off as you match pieces in that space. The darker the space, the more times you have to break it. Then they started throwing in apples and cherries which you have to bring to the bottom WHILE clearing jelly. Then they added cages to the jelly to make them even harder to clear. Then they added chocolate (as seen above) which reproduces by masturbation. You make a move, it eats a square. If you don’t get rid of it, it eats up the entire board. Then they added wormholes (also seen above). The pieces fall through the bottom of the board on the left and land atop the board on the right. Right board is full of caged jelly holding back that randy chocolate. Clear the jelly, you free the chocolate. If the chocolate gets up to the top (like it has above) you are more or less screwed.
Oh, and they added super powers, to an extent. Get four pieces in a row and you get a striped piece, which will clear the entire row horizontally or vertically when played. Get five in a row and you get a sprinkly turd that, when combined with any piece, clears every piece of that color on the board. If you get lucky enough to combine the sprinkly turd with the striped piece, all of those colored pieces turned into stripes and starts clearing out your board like a chalupa does to your innards. There is also a wrapped piece which, when combined with the striped piece, makes a mega piece which sweeps across the board up and down, destroying rows at a time.
I’m completely addicted to this game. I’m not even ashamed to admit it anymore. It has completely sucked me in. Luckily, I play it on my iPad and you get five lives. Once you fail five times, you have to wait twenty minutes for the next life to regenerate, so filling the lifes back up takes nearly two hours. Of course, you can connect to Facebook to get more lives from friends but I am NOT connecting it to Facebook.
The funny thing is, when I started playing this I never heard a word about it. Now I get invitations from friends on Facebook constantly and they are on levels I can’t even begin to imagine. See that picture up top? That was from my game today and that’s level 70. I am getting notifications that friends of mine are finishing level 138 and shit. What?
Maybe you get super powers if you play on Facebook?
Maybe I should check that out…in a little while. It’s been nearly two hours since I played.
