Preview by: Brandon “Steam Engine” Cackowski-Schnell

It's a tale as old as time. A young lad moves to a new school, gets picked on and chased by jocks and then saved by geeks who employ him to create Rube Goldberg contraptions that are eventually used to take out the evil jocks. Ok, so maybe it's not that old but that is, in a nutshell, what you'll be doing on this upcoming puzzler.

Don't worry though, you won't just be let loose into an equipment room and have to take out the jocks all MacGyver style. Instead you work your way through puzzle after puzzle, each one with a set amount of equipment that has to be placed in the environment all to accomplish a specific goal such as popping balloons or delivering a tennis ball to a box. The puzzles all follow real world physics rules which can lead to some trial and error as physics doesn't always do what you want it to do.

The puzzles are divided up into different types such as mechanical that use gears, pulleys and ramps and gases/fluids that use steam engines and water to meet your goals. Puzzles aren't timed, however, times are kept track of with the best times earning a spot on the leader board known as the Nobel Prize. Once you move through all of the puzzles within a certain section you'll have a boss battle of sorts where you use your contraption building skills to deal with whatever particular jock torments your guide through the section. These boss battles are timed requiring you to be quick on your feet but failure only leads to a restart of the level.

You'll use a combination of the stylus for selecting and placing objects and the DS's buttons for switching between top and bottom screens and rotating things like planks. Having to switch between screens makes item placement a bit confusing as at times it seems that you could select any item on the puzzle screen to work with but at others you can only work with whatever item is selected on the item selection screen. It's not terribly difficult to work with once you spend time with it, just confusing at first.

Puzzles ramp up in difficulty fairly quickly however there is a hit button you can use to show you where the currently selected item should go. In some cases the difficulty comes about from needing precise placement to ensure that the physics cooperates while in others thinking outside of the box will win the day. In one such puzzle, one steam engine, one heat source and one vertical pipe was provided to blow two balloons on opposite sides of the screen into scissors, popping the in the process. No combination of connecting the pipe to the steam engine could get both balloons popped so instead I placed the pipe horizontally above the steam engine so that when the steam traveled up it hit the pipe and then spread out along the length of the pipe eventually hitting the baloons and blowing them into the scissors. Now that's using your noggin!

Fans of contraption based puzzles will want to keep an eye on this one leading up to the game's release. The potential for maddening difficulty is there and I saw no indication of the "tongue in cheek" story boasted about in the press releases, but if you're looking for some physics based puzzle action, I Heart Geeks may fit the bill.

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