Baker Street, by Public
Pocket Games, $9.99
Reviewed November 2002
If you know who lived on Baker Street and
where the Dancing Men came from, you’ve come to the
right place. Baker Street is a Bejeweled (Diamond Mine) clone
a theme cleverly borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
famous Sherlock Holmes collection of detective stories. No,
you won’t travel down the muddy trails of a mysterious
small town, nor sit by the fire in the flat on Baker Street
with Watson by your side. What you will do in this new game
by Public Pocket Games is racing the burning candle and sliding
the little dancing men.
For those of you who have played Bejeweled,
this isn’t anything new, except the bonus play. The
game requires that you remove a certain number of tiles.
You will need to match up 3 or more tiles with the same dancing
man image by swapping the tiles nearby. The more tiles matched
in a move, the higher the score you’ll earn. Once the
tiles are matched, they will disappear and the new ones will
fill up from the top. There are two counters in Baker Street,
unlike Diamond Mine/Bejeweled where you only have one timer.
The candle on the left represents how many more tiles remain,
and each time you match up tiles the candle will burn out
a little. When this candle burns out you will not have any
more fresh tiles. The right candle starts burning after the
left candle dims, though much faster than the left one, leaving
you a very short time to finish matching the tiles left on
the board. The matches you make after the right candle starts
burning will earn you a higher score.
There are other ways to increase the score
in Baker Street and those come from the bonus items. When
you clear a given number of tiles, you’ll get 6 bonus
items including hints, remove massive number of tiles, and
dancing man replacement. Use these items when you get stuck,
especially the Smoke Pipe which will remove most of the tiles
on the current screen and the dancing man replacement to
complete matches when no more fresh tiles are available.
The Magnifying Glass will multiply the score of your next
move by 10, so use it wisely. These bonus items and the effects
they create give this classic game a new twist. The use of
Dancing Men is a very creative. You start with 6 dancing
figures and in each new level you will see one more new figure;
just like in The Adventure of the Dancing Men where the new
dancing figures appeared each time there was a new development
in the case.
The graphics fit well with the theme of
the game. The layout and color create a dim environment that
reminds you a little bit of that dark room on Baker Street
with that intense detective studying evidence beneath candlelight.
There are shortcut buttons on top of the game window giving
you easy access to New Game, Pause, Sound On/Off and Exit.
You can access Help window and High Score board, which are
also decorated with artifacts appeared daily in Holmes’ life.
The music and sound are nice company to
the graphics and help building the environment. There is
no option to change volume. So you should check the device
volume before entering the game. The game had a nice auto-save
feature, which comes in handy when you need to start and
stop the game often. Although there are unlimited levels
in Baker Street, I have not been able to pass level 2. Baker
Street supports both ARM and MIPS and takes about 0.7MB of
memory.
Playing Hints and Tips
When the left candle is burning, use as
much time as you can to plan your moves. The candle doesn’t
burn when you are thinking; it only burns when you’ve
made a move. When the right candle starts burning, move fast!
Plan your moves with the bonus items to gain high scores. |
