E-Mail This Article to a Friend Block party Polarium and Puzzle Pirates BY MITCH KRPATA
	Polarium Published by Nintendo. Developed by Mitchell Corporation. For Nintendo DS. Rated E for Everyone. Puzzle Pirates Published by Ubisoft. Developed by Three Rings Design. For PC and Mac. Rated T for Teen.

Nintendo's Game Boy became the best-selling game console in history largely due to the killer app to end all killer apps, Tetris. The deceptively simple puzzle game hypnotized anyone who picked it up, and as such the game's audience extended far beyond prototypical gamers. Probably aiming for that same mass audience, Nintendo has released Polarium, a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS with play as streamlined as that of Tetris, but lacking its lasting appeal.

Another entry in the "make falling blocks disappear" genre, Polarium throws at the player grids comprised of black-and-white tiles. The player vaporizes a horizontal line by flipping over tiles to make each line either all black or all white. But the real trick, of course, is eliminating several lines at once, lest the plummeting debris stack up to the top of the screens – the kiss of death in any puzzle game.

Polarium's greatest innovation is its interface; the game is controlled entirely with the stylus and touchscreen. Rather than flip one tile at a time, the strategy is to draw a single line around the game board in order to eliminate as many lines as possible. The learning curve is steep despite a comprehensive tutorial, and I found the challenge mode uncommonly difficult to master. More fun is puzzle mode, which provides 100 static boards that must be completed with one unbroken run of the stylus. Even so, some of the puzzles can be solved using an uncreative, brute-force approach, even as one gets the impression that the designers had intended a more elegant solution.

To their credit, Polarium's designers have taken advantage of many of the DS's capabilities. In addition to wireless head-to-head play, gamers can create and share their own custom puzzle boards. Still, we've seen the DS hardware perform some impressive feats, and this monochromatic puzzle game – with its horrid, repetitive soundtrack – hardly justifies its existence in the year 2005. While it's amusing in spurts, Polarium is all too easy to put down, and hardly more engaging than the puzzle games that accompany Microsoft Windows.

More elaborate in concept and in execution is Puzzle Pirates for the PC and Mac, a rather bizarre hybrid of puzzle games and persistent online role-playing games like Everquest and World of Warcraft. After creating one's own pirate character, the player is deposited on an island in the middle of an ocean teeming with other pirates and their ships. Most of the pirates are controlled by other players, although some are bots and some are Puzzle Pirates staffers. The colorful design and happy-looking pirates make for a mostly inviting, communal atmosphere, although I confess I hadn't been logged on for more than an hour before I encountered another player employing the phrase "donkey balls." (It should be mentioned that most players I encountered were friendly and made an admirable effort to speak in pirate parlance, often punctuating their sentences with "Arr!")

The "puzzle" aspect of the game is multifaceted. Everything a pirate ordinarily does – sailing, looting, swordfighting, drinking, and so on – is represented in the game as a different puzzle. While none of the puzzles seems truly original, there are so many of them that one can always find something enjoyable. For example, the head-to-head swordfighting puzzle is nearly identical to Capcom's cult favorite Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and bilging is accomplished through a gem-swapping game very similar to PopCap's Bejeweled.

Players start as a no-name, no-rep, wannabe pirate – not unlike Guybrush Threepwood from the classic Secret of Monkey Island – and can take on various jobs in order to raise their stock. Theoretically, any player can work his or her way up the ladder and captain a ship, but it's not necessary. In fact, the somewhat lackadaisical pace of most of the puzzles means that it's possible to surf the web or check e-mail while playing and not miss a beat. And that's a good thing. Not so good are the periodic "duty reports" that let you know how everyone on the ship is faring in their individual tasks. While it's great to know that the computer considers your carpentry "fantastic," being interrupted mid-puzzle with no warning gets annoying quickly.

There is a subscription fee to play Puzzle Pirates beyond its $19.99 retail price. Plans vary – the monthly fee is $9.95, although quarterly and annual payments offer price breaks – but overall it seems a fair price for what you get. In addition to the puzzles already included in the game, Ubisoft promises "more being added on a regular basis." The community seems vibrant and busy, with some indoor environments so crowded it's hard to move around.

While the Puzzle Pirates world is fairly superficial when compared to other persistent online realms, the puzzles are absorbing and the buccaneer motif is a winning one. Hardcore gamers can pass, but Puzzle Pirates deserves to be a hit with casual players who prefer The Sims to Counterstrike.

Scores (out of 10):

Polarium: 5.0

Puzzle Pirates: 8.0