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| | Publisher: Icon Factory  Genre: Arcade | | Mac OS X: 10.4 Mac OS Classic: Not Supported
CPU: G4 Graphics: 32 MB VRAM |
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Describing The Icon Factory’s frantic, stylish puzzle game, Frenzic, can be a little difficult. On first glimpse, the graphics were so appealing that they made me hungry. It’s bright little wedges reminded me of those tangy, citrus-flavored fruit slice candies. And the music: so hypnotically jazzy that I just wanted to leave it running even when I wasn’t playing the game.Frenzic is a rapid-fire puzzle game where you match colored wedges to form complete pies. The point of the game is to survive as long as possible as the game continually ups the pace. The Frenzic board has seven circular ports arranged on a round board. Get your wedges from the middle port and place them in one of the six ports around the perimeter to make complete pies. You can make pies of one color or many, but you get the biggest scores by making pies from just wedges of the same hue. It takes six wedges to fill a pie, and the wedges come in three colors, green, purple and orange. The center port puts out wedges of any of the three colors in varying orientations, and your job is to fit them into an available spot on the board as fast as you can. At the beginning of the game, you have about seven seconds to place the first wedge. As the game progresses, you have less and less time to make your choice. The six ports come in two basic types. Three ports have special bonus properties, and three are nothing special. But all ports are important. The three special ports have power-up buttons next to them. When you complete a pie in a special port with wedges of one only color, you get a power up.Power ups come in three types. In the twelve-o’clock position you will find the Nuke power up. When you press this baby, it clears all the previously placed wedges off the board — with a satisfying bumph. In the eight-o’clock spot is the hourglass power up. This one slows the game time by 75% for 25 seconds. Now in the four-o’clock spot is the most important power up of all: the x2. This notable knob doubles all your scores for 25 seconds. In fact, if you happen to press the Nuke button to clear the board while your x2 power up is running, you can get quite major jolt of points all at once. On the other hand, the game will not allow you to run the hourglass and x2 power ups at the same time. So if you press one while the other is running, the first one stops and the second one starts. Scores in Frenzic vary according to the number of wedges in a pie and how many like-colored wedges are in that pie. Points are scored when a piece is placed and when it is cleared. Every like-colored wedge is worth one more point than the one before it. For example, the green first wedge in a pie would be worth one point. The next green would be worth two, and another green would count for three. That’s six for the first three wedges.
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