This game is awesome. In it, you are a bomb defusal expert for the Department of Homeland Security. You first learn how to p;ay the game, and then are confronted with several types of ever more difficult bombs.

The game screen consists of a pattern of black octagons. At the top right of the screen, there is a number. This is the number of pistons you must defuse. However, you must find the pistons first.

This is done with several beams of light, called SDU's. Next to the total piston number, there is a number that is how many pistons are hidden in the spaces crossed by the SDU's.

To help yourself, you are able to label spaces without a piston with an X, or a ? if you are not sure (like minesweeper). If you confirm that a spac contains a piston, you must label it with a !. There is a counter on the right side of the screen indicating how many ! you have placed. If this number exceeds the number of pistons, you have done something wrong.

That is all good and fine, but it gets better. all bombs have a timer. Once that timer reaches around 6 seconds, the screen begins to shake. At 3 seconds, a noise akin to a turbine begins. At 0, the screen flashes white, and you are asked if you want to restart the level. You only have one chance to find out if you are right, and a single messed up square will result in the bomb exploding at the end of the timer.

When you are confident that your answer is right, you can press Enter to run the clock down to 10 seconds. Then you must wait in anticipation and or anxiety, to see if the bomb explodes. The screen shakes, the noise winds up, and...MISSION COMPLETE.

This game is really action packed for a puzzle game. There are several types of bomb, each adding a unique gameplay element, and there are even some obstacles that interrupt your bomb-defusing abilities. I highly suggest you read through the manual. Not only is is dressed up like a government document, but it reveals all of the bomb's specialties, and tells you of the bonuses you get when you beat all 50 levels. Every time you play one of the fifty levels, it is different. That's right. Infinite gameplay.

The premise of Blobs is probably nothing new to most: A bunch of Blobs are allocated on a board (which varies between levels), and your goal is to have them jump over their adjacent blobby brethren, 'erasing' them in the process, until there is but one blob standing. The learning curve in this game is perfect, and that is one of the reasons it gets such a high score. The first few levels do a great job of teaching you the deceptively-simple logic of Blobs, and the rest of the puzzles gradually increase in difficulty, eventually reaching a point where some will be on the verge of tearing their hair out. Don't worry about premature baldness when playing Blobs, though, because 90% of the time the solution will come to you in a wondrous epiphany; and when it doesn't, there is always the infamous auto-solve button.

Both types of balls have different reactions when the are placed and activated: Radium will create a line going in a direction which is specified on the radium ball, and uranium will activate all balls in a limited surrounding area. The object is to place all the balls in positions where their "radiation" will hit the other balls, activating them, which in turn activate other balls, hence the games title, "Chain Reaction". Getting everything just right can be quite complicated and take more than a few tries, but it is alot fun.

The graphics are pretty nice, even though this kind of game does not really require special graphics, they still make the game more fun. The music is excellent, especially the first track, which is taken from one of the songs by the band "The Offspring". You may not share my tastes, but if you do it's good stuff.

There are 30+ levels in the game, and there is plenty of reason to finish all of them. I'm not gonna spoil it for you but there is a "Hidden Features" option which you can open really cool stuff in as you progress through the levels. Most of it is really cool stuff that is worth playing for. The game is great anyways, so you'll probably end up trying to beat the game even if not for the hidden stuff. But let me just say that one of the hidden stuff is a mini-game that is a great puzzle game in itself and that I was playing it nearly as much as the actual game!