But no, the rest of PopCap's peculiar collection is up there on Steam to enjoy. So why? Why on EARTH would EA go to such lengths to destroy one of the most innoccuous games ever created? I mean, if there had been some harebrained scheme to erase the pre-existence of EA's ownership of PopCap, to carve some Stalinist revision of history where the only franchises that remain are those fully massacred with microtransactions and mobile advertising, then it would at least make some half-sense. Nooooooo! Surely their madness wouldn't extend to deliberately sabotaging the digital remains of this peculiar, inexplicable killing? In the end, copying the steam.dll from Steam's main directory into the BWA directory "fixed" this oddity, and the game launches! Hoorah! It does still exist! Albeit as a ghost. some strange message about "steam.dll" being unfound.
#Popcap game bookworm install
So I was able to install it from my library, despite the link to its store page redirecting you back to the front page. It's erased from everywhere.įortunately, when you own something on Steam it's pretty hard for it to be taken away from you again. But the word "Bookworm" doesn't appear on the mutilated corpse of PopCap's website anywhere. I then went to what I'll loosely call "PopCap"'s website, to see if maybe it was at least on mobile? Probably reprogrammed to have you have to pay microtransactions per word spelt or something. So I blew the thick layer of dust off of Origin, loaded it up, waited for it to break a few times, loaded it again, and searched for it there. It'll be stuck on Origin for no good reason, won't it?
Oh for flip's sake, I thought to myself, bloody EA. Which was odd, since it was on Steam from the 2nd January 2007, and I'd always played it there since. So I typed the name into Steam to get to its store page, and. It'd be a nostalgic, smile-inducing article about something good and pure. I could replay a well-loved game, and bring up the old RPS rivalry between it and Peggle, and celebrate how funny it was, and how brilliantly it noticed thematic words. And yes, if this is sounding incredibly familiar despite never having played BWA back in 2007, it is also the exact same setup as 2014's Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey.Īs it happens, it was playing Letter Quest on my Switch with the boy that reminded me how fun it might be to dig out Bookworm Adventures for this column. To do this, you must of course spell out the longest words you can from a 4x4 grid of lettered tiles, the formed words used as a weapon against the story-themed enemies, beating the crap out of them.Īs you progress, the tiles become cracked, poisoned, concrete, etc, and different letters are worth more when used in words. You play as Lex, a sesquipedalian worm, who is sent inside a library book to attempt to rescue Greek mythological heroine Cassandra. But Bookworm Adventures transformed it into something so damned weird that it could only be magic. There was a game before it, Bookworm, a more traditional puzzler, that honestly isn't very good. Yeah, bet you forgot that one! And while perhaps their peak crossover moment came with Plants Vs Zombies, moments before they were bought by EA, for me my favourite will always be that wormy word game.
So much so that there was even a crossover special edition of Peggle in Valve's Orange Box. Probably most broadly famous for Bejeweled, they were putting out a mix of so many game types, from hidden object to arcade to pachinko, managing to blur the fiercely guarded line between "casual" and "hardcore".
Even more so the breadth of their appeal, somehow ingeniously presenting themselves as both a "casual games" outlet releasing across all those super-mainstream sites like Big Fish, and a specialist company who were incredibly early to get their games onto Steam. It's hard to believe just what an extraordinary hit factory PopCap was back in 2007. If I had to keep one, I'd have trodden on Peggle to save my Bookworm Adventures. But there was one of us that preferred another PopCap game at the time, and that handsome chap was me.
We all loved Peggle, because we weren't mad. A file size that became peculiarly important to the site for a number of years - for reasons implausible to explain it became the international unit for measuring demo sizes. Back in the very early days of RPS, a little game called Peggle was released.
0 kommentar(er)
