Tangle: Addictively Tanglesome
Tangle is a puzzle based game of intersecting lines. The premise is dead simple, untangle all of the lines by moving the colored vertices around and you win. Depending on how fast you can perform this feat determines your score. Tangle is one of those surprisingly addictive games that make you wonder why your girlfriend is not speaking with you anymore.
The only real caveat to the gameplay is that you can move two vertices at once by holding shift when selecting them. Also don’t be surprised if you don’t fare that well when playing Tangle - after about an hours worth of playing I was only able to reach the 6th game board! In fact according to the developers you will never see the same game board twice, so in that respect Tangle offers unlimited play value.
In multiplayer mode Tangle allows you to challenge a friend by playing an identical play-field and seeing who can untangle it the fastest. I think this might be the best feature of the game, and I found this the most enjoyable mode of play. You can even taunt your opponent via text chat allowing for some good old fashioned trash talk.
While Tangle is quite a fun distraction I think the asking price of $20 is a bit steep, especially after I came across this TUAW post by Erica Sadun describing Planarity, a free online flash game, which is virtually identicle to the single player experience of Tangle. Having said that, I still think the shareware version if Tangle is worth the download, and it operates fully functional for 1 hour of gameplay.
With a registered version Tangle allows you to upload your high scores to its leaderboard to show off your prowess to other Tanglers. Tangle is available as shareware from mc hot software.
Neat game.