The Stack

I’ve just been making unexpectedly fast progress in Zuma‘s Adventure mode, reaching the game’s ninth and possibly final ¹I don’t really believe this. For one thing, it’s identified as “The Last Stage (?)”, complete with question mark, and for another, why would you stop at a symmetric nine level (three groups of three) when you can round it off with a nice climactic boss fight? plateau. (Adventure mode is organized around a series of nine chambers, each holding a progressively longer series of levels. You can start a game at any chamber you’ve gained access to, but you always start at that chamber’s first level.)

I find that progress in this game comes in bursts and lulls: either you’re in the “zone” or you’re not, and if you’re not, you’re probably not going to make it out of the first level you attempt. The zone is of course the fabled state of utter concentration on the task at hand, possibly akin to what Buddhists call “single-pointedness”. In this particular game, aiming being a relatively trivial matter due to the mouse controls, the zone manifests mainly as an ability to quickly and easily spot the most promising spots to place a ball of a given color. (The potential for cascades is usually the most important consideration: not only does a cascade delete more stuff, it also makes balls move backward to close the gap, granting the player some respite from imminent doom.)

At any rate, it’s an extraordinarily zone-based game. It seems to me that even the superficial design assists here, the garish colors and relentless music producing a sensory overload that’s conducive to altered states of consciousness.