Complete Waste of Time

There's an old saying about simple minds and simple pleasures, and I suppose nothing confirms this like my newest favorite time-waster.

Bookworm Adventures from PopCap Games

You may be familiar with the original Bookworm game, as it showed up on Yahoo Games and MSN Games and heaven only knows where else. This one uses the same basic premise—spelling words from a set of tiles—but in a completely different way. Each word that you spell gives your avatar, a cutest little bookworm, power to battle foes from water elementals to angry rams to sirens to Cerberus. The longer a word you can spell, the more powerful your attacks are. Using letters like J, X, and Z also make your attacks more efficient. And at the higher levels you get power-ups and potions that help you in your quest to save the imprisoned Cassandra.

Yes, it's a geek game, but I love it. And I'm pretty good at it. I've exhausted the free trial version, culminating in a Boss Battle where you have to fight each of the seven heads of the mythic Hydra with no rest and recovery in between. I'd love to see what comes after that, but at the moment, I just can't justify the $30 to get the full version.

And just in case you were curious, here are my best words so far:

Humanities
Musketeers
Herbivores
Planetaria
Weathering

This is from a 4x4 grid, by the way, so there are only 16 letters to work with on any given word. I think the fact that I've got five different words of 10 letters is pretty darned impressive.