Computer Games

Recently I've been playing 2 computer games; Zuma and World of Goo.

Zuma is an action puzzle game with a very basic mechanism, very repetitive gameplay, recycling of levels (you get them again but faster later in the game), churned out by an outfit called PopCap who appear (from their website) to produce hundreds of similar games, in a kind of scorched earth approach to marketing.

World of Goo is another puzzle game, occasionally action but generally much more cerebral, with beautiful artwork, highly individual and obviously finely crafted levels, a storyline with cut scenes and many games industry and computer science in jokes, and produced by an independent games company consisting of 2 or 3 guys, which seems beyond belief since the game exudes quality in a way that many games from big publishers don't.

As an appreciator of games, art and independent publishing, I find it rather irritating that Zuma is the more compelling game for me...