Windows

Lose Your Marbles

LYM doesn't waste disk space with flashy visuals or overblown sounds. Instead, the bright graphics, unique noises and fine MIDI music add up to create a solid challenge. Controls and skill levels can both be adjusted to personal taste and the two-player and network options only increase the game's humble appeal. Roll over, Tetris - make room for marbles.

I really like Lose Your Marbles, and am glad SegaSoft chose to offer a simple, fun, and engaging animated puzzle game that breaks out of the mode of what is normally on the shelves. This game is the second in the company's series of inexpensive "Desktop Distractions" (Web Vengeance was the first), and it is so addicting that it indeed is likely to stay on people's desktops and distract them a lot from their work. Just as SegaSoft's earlier Obsidian in my view knocked Myst off its lofty perch, Lose Your Marbles (despite its minor imperfections) has a decent shot at replacing Tetris as the standard by which future action puzzles will be judged.

For folk of literally any age, Lose Your Marbles offers painless, brainless fun in the same vein as Tetris, to which SegaSoft so readily compares it. If any game needs a patch applied to your shoulder to make you stop inhaling it in under two weeks (or your money back), this one does.

Lose Your Marbles is a solid puzzler, one that acts as a nice diversion. With a $20 price tag, I highly recommend it for mortgage company receptionists and poor college students who love to kill time. However, it doesn't offer anything new for the hard-core gamer, though it does wonders for those of us with an annoying overabundance of brain cells...hee, hee. Man make funny joke there...