Revenge of Zuma!

Remember the golden days of puzzle games? Nintendo threw every mixture of colored blocks they could at us and we let it all build up until we got the really long straight piece and then... everything disappeared. I mean, there was a point when the characters from Street Fighter had their own puzzle game, when you'd have a couple editions of Bust-A-Move a year (there have been at least 26 iterations since the game debuted in 1993), when people shared their Tetris high scores over a bottle of wine...

Tetris is still a friggin great game, and I still haven't gotten the space shuttle to launch in the regular mode...

Snood - which you might consider a Bust-A-Move clone - hit the nation's universities for a while, and ultimately turned from shareware into a full console release... But it was ugly as sin.

What would happen if someone made a simple, interesting, new puzzle game that utilized the 3d processing of even base-level PCs - or at least took some advantage of the tremendous color depth of contemporary displays?

Probably, the gorgeous Zuma. The rule set is basic, the construction is elegant, and the result is a game that demands creativity and coordination. Colored balls slowly roll down a winding track towards a consuming hole. Your goal is to stop them, often by stringing palindrome combos so stunning that they temporarily reverse gravity's downward pull.

It's not going to be a phenom (not because of any fault of the game), but if your heart is ever warmed thinking about the proper techniques for placing a z-block or the time you thread the needle to topple three-quarters of a Snood board... Reawaken that slumbering puzzle gamer and try out Zuma.