Apple - Games - Articles - Big Bang Brain Games

Game Media

By Brad Cook

“It’s a good evening for a puzzle,” the spikey-haired deity known as Sol proclaims. Behind him, an orange planet slowly spins as rocky asteroids orbit it.

You agree, selecting the course called Metamorphose, where you failed to attain par last time. Sol grins and turns, a lightning strike from one hand splitting an asteroid in two. Half of the rock spins toward you and a game board appears on its flat side. It contains a handful of rotating molecules, along with two arrows and an angled mirror.

You click an undersized molecule twice, forcing it to explode. The resulting chain reaction wipes the board clean, leaving you one shot under par. “You’re on fire!” Sol says with a smile.

The next board appears, another deceptively simple puzzle that you complete easily. Sol again congratulates you and offers up a series of puzzles that grow increasingly complex, until you’re facing conundrums full of various-sized molecules, anti-particles, regular and angled mirrors, wormholes, and more. By the end of the ninth level, you’re again well over the total par of 31, and Sol has resorted to taunting you with each mistake.

You resolve to get the best of him, one of these days.

Brag About Your Scores, Find Easter Eggs

Big Bang Reaction is just one of the six brain-teasing puzzlers you’ll find in Big Bang Brain Games. Sol also hosts Sudoku, while Wisdom takes you through Fallacy and Echo and Luna shows you the ropes in NovaSweeper and Remembrance. All three hosts feature unique personalities.

When you finish a round in any of the games, you can publish your score on the Internet with a .Mac account. The “Brag via .Mac!” feature automatically posts your score on your home page. You can also click the “Scores” option in the menu to see your history rendered as a chart, complete with a bar representing your best score and dots that mark different sessions and their scores.

In addition, each Big Bang Brain Game features a variety of the silly Easter eggs that Freeverse is known for hiding in its games. We recommend clicking the icons in the corners of each screen, as well as seeing what happens when you pause the action. Can you make a donut hurtle through the background? Mmmmmmm, donuts …

Go For an Eagle

In Big Bang Reaction, you must clear the molecules from each board with the fewest number of shots, or clicks. Click an undersized molecule to build it up until it bursts. When it does so, particles fly in all four directions, bursting full-sized molecules in their paths as well as traveling where the arrows, mirrors, and wormholes take them. Black anti-molecules absorb particles and don’t explode, while supercharged molecules scatter more debris every time they’re hit.

The number of shots you use to clear a board dictates your score, based on the par provided at the beginning. Try to keep your overall shot total for each course as far under par as possible, which will increase your overall score. There’s no time limit, so take as long as necessary before you start clicking.

Your best bet is to build up and explode an undersized molecule near several full-size, or almost full-size, ones, causing a chain reaction as the bursting molecules release particles that explode their neighbors, which spew particles that in turn destroy other molecules. And so forth.

The Digits Must Occur Only Once

Sol also brings his snappy patter to Big Bang Sudoku, based on the popular puzzle found in many newspapers. The goal is to fill a 9x9 grid with the numbers one through nine, without repeating numbers in the same row, column or region, which is a 3x3 area marked by a thicker line. Your score depends on both a puzzle’s challenge level and how long it took you to complete it.

A puzzle’s overall difficulty contributes the most to its total challenge level, while checking the boxes for the Allow Hints, Show Errors, and Automatic Pencil Marks options will decrease it. If you ask for a hint, Sol adds time to your total. You can turn the highlight guides on and off, and you can also erase the automatic pencil marks if that option isn’t checked.

Fixing Fallacies and Repeating Echoes

Wisdom takes over hosting duties for Big Bang Fallacy and Big Bang Echo. The first is a quiz game that presents hypothetical situations and asks which sloppy rhetorical trick has been used: slippery slope, two wrongs make a right, gambler’s fallacy, hasty generalization, appeal to common practice, appeal to fear, post hoc, burden of proof, or appeal to spite. It will help you see the fallacies used all too often in many people’s arguments, and Wisdom would love to see everyone become more wise.

Big Bang Echo features four spinning planets, each of which makes a different tone when clicked. Repeat the pattern Wisdom plays, which gets increasingly complex until you reach the finale, where you try to go as far as you can without making a mistake. Wisdom ups the ante occasionally by rotating the planets clockwise, reversing a sequence, and increasing the number of tones in the round’s starting sequence.

MineSweeper and Memory Get Updated

Luna shows up for NovaSweeper — described by Freeverse as “the most impressive Minesweeper game ever created” — and the card-matching game Remembrance. Each NovaSweeper board, which can be 9x9, 14x14, or 20x20, contains a number of hidden supernovas that you must detect by clicking blocks on the grid. An empty square with a number indicates how many supernovas it’s touching.

Place flags on the boxes that you think contain supernovas. If you stick them on the right squares and you don’t click on a supernova, which will end the game immediately, your score will be calculated by factoring in the size of the board and the amount of time you spent. The small board has 10 supernovas, while the medium one has 35 and the largest one has 85.

Remembrance lays out a 4x4 or 6x6 grid of cards and challenges you to use your short-term memory to match all 8 or 18 pairs as fast as possible. Luna will give you a quick peek at the cards before she flips them over. Your score depends on the size of the grid and the length of time you spent uncovering all of the pairs.