Bejeweled Twist a gameplay gem for PopCap

After nearly four years, you'd think the PopCap crew would feel good about kicking up their heels at the release of Bejeweled Twist, the third version of their iconic casual game.

But CEO Dave Roberts seemed a bit abashed Monday night, even as a flock of spangled trapeze artists prepared to loft themselves high above a launch-party crowd.

The first new version of Bejeweled in nearly four years launches at the start of a nasty-looking recession, and with a gala reception no less.

"We, uh, planned all this [festivity] well before the trouble started," said Roberts, "and once things started to happen we talked about whether to go ahead." But Bejeweled's got a history of launching into recessionary headwinds; in its earlier Diamond Mine incarnation, the venerable game launched just a few months before dot-com bubble burst in 2000. "So when you get that next Save the Date card from us..."

Nervous giggles throughout the room. But Roberts, along with PopCap cofounders John Vechey, Jason Kalpacha and Brian Fiete, made an eloquent case on Monday for celebrating the new game in particular and the health of the casual-gaming market in general: Fun is worthwhile even when -- especially when -- times are tough. A $20 game can bring a lot of relief when the world's looking dim.

It can bring in a lot of cash, too. Roberts allowed that PopCap's having an excellent year, with $170 million in revenue projected; it's the biggest powerhouse in the $2.5 billion casual-gaming industry, and Bejeweled's near-ubiquity (PC! Mac! Web! mobile phones! iPods! scratch-off games! in-flight entertainment systems!) is estimated to account for over 6 billion hours of gameplay worldwide since 2000.

There's only one other game with that kind of ubiquity, and Bejeweled has a lot in common with Tetris -- including a remarkable number of clones, knockoffs and copycats, over 150 at last count. Between that and the try-before-you-buy shareware-descended payment model the company embraces, you'd think the execs would be crying over lost opportunities, but Kalpacha shrugs when asked about it. "You can't copyright game mechanics," he notes, and the match-three concept isn't that revolutionary. "A few times we've sent out a cease-and-desist order, but not many."

And now Bejeweled shares something else with Tetris: rotation. The twist in "Twist" is a circular motion heretofore unknown in these parts -- instead of swapping position for two jewels, you rotate a group of four in a clockwise direction to make your three-, four- and five-jewel matches. It's certainly Bejeweled, but the gameplay is just different enough to push seasoned players out of their comfort zone.

Bejeweled also shares something else with Tetris -- that unnerving tendency to burrow into one's head.

During the demonstration, the spangly trapeze artists were all quite fetching, but this reporter noticed that almost everyone in the crowd was honestly staring at the demo screen -- and that in many cases, hands were twitching in exactly the way they do when you wish someone would just hand over the controls already. Afterward, at demo stations around the room, you could watch hors d'oeuvres, networking, wineglasses, and trapeze artists all receding as players slipped into that happy place one goes too when the rhythm of the game sets in. A PopCap employee confided that during gameplay in the weeks before the launch, she started dreaming in rotations -- faces in dreams would start rearranging themselves.

And afterward? Your humble reviewer downloaded a fresh copy for her Windows machine and set to work around 11 pm. Suddenly it was 4 am and I was deep into Junior Rotator status in Zen mode (with Classic, Blitz and Challenge modes yet unexplored); I couldn't blink both eyes at the same time but I was awfully proud to have nearly unlocked a Fruit Gem and to have mastered the basics of deploying Flame and Lightning Gems to clear the coal off the screen.

Bejeweled Twist looks and sounds fantastic -- PopCap claims this the game's production values are the highest in the casual-game genre, and that claim seems plausible based on what's onscreen. But the gameplay's the thing, and though twisting and rotating sounds un-Bejewelly at first, it's a matter of minutes before a player finds herself back in that hour-melting groove. In short, it's Bejeweled all right -- never better in fact. Kiss your productivity and sleep cycles goodbye, and wait out the recession with those shiny baubles.