Candy Crushed!

After being sent 429 requests to play Candy Crush by friends, I decided to download and play it. It’s really quite a fun and entertaining little game which I initially thought doesn’t require much thinking and effort. After all, how difficult is it to shift colourful blocks around to form lines of 3 or 4, right? So I quickly breezed through the first few levels and was about to delete the game. But then I hit the higher levels. Not so difficult? Boy, was I wrong! And interestingly, as I was furiously crushing candy, I discovered (and re-discovered) a few ideas :

1. You need to be intentional in what you do. Sure, you can just complete the first triplet of blocks that you see on the screen, but when you reach the levels that require you to “bring the ingredients down”, you seriously  need to pause and think. Because certain triplets will shift the gameboard in more significant and useful ways than others. So you have to be really intentional in shifting them around to achieve the desired goal for each level. Not always easy!

2. Small actions can have huge consequences. Ok, I’m exaggerating a little. Most of the time, shifting blocks around will just complete that particular triplet, and that’s it. But every once in a while, a simple move can trigger off a series of other triplets being completed and suddenly I have a triple combo, striped candies and sugar-coated blocks appearing everywhere followed by a scary-sounding voice telling me “Excellent! Good job! Sweet!” While I’d like to think that it was due to my prescient foresight and precise planning, more often than that, it is fluke plain and simple. But this made me think of how small actions, careless words, thoughtless decisions can often have a cascading avalanche effect in our lives.

3. There is nothing new under the sun. Doesn’t Candy Crush seem similar to Bejeweled? Which seems similar to many ‘match 3’ games in the past? The fact that Candy Crush is the latest fad now tells me that quite soon, some other ‘hot’ game will replace it and we will start getting friends’ requests to play that game. Time to get ready for ‘Angry Candy’ or ‘Birds Crushed’ or something. =D

Ok, I think I think too much when I play the game! =D Sometimes, my friends would ask, “Can’t you just play the *&$# game and enjoy it?” Actually I do enjoy it! Just that I have a weird mind that likes to roam on its own and make connections from here and there and everywhere. But I like the way it is. =)

~ by irwin on February 20, 2013.