Tuesday focus: Gadgets

Kids of all ages love to build structures, whether it be with Tinkertoys, Legos, Erector sets, or jellybeans and toothpicks.

“World of Goo,” a puzzle game for the computer and the Nintendo Wii, delivers one of the coolest sets of building tools: balls of squirming goo.

By combining these globs of stickiness together to form structures, you solve the 48 puzzles that make up this game.

While the puzzles are tied together with an elusive story line about a big corporation that misuses these little blobs to make products, the focus of the game is solving these refreshingly unusual building puzzles.

In each puzzle, you are presented with wriggling goo balls and an exit drainpipe that is far away. Your objective is to combine some of the goo balls into a structure that will span the terrain to enable the remaining goo to travel over the structure to reach the pipe.

As the puzzles get harder, building around or over goo-destroying obstacles including hills, cliffs, chasms, pits of doom, goo-popping machinery and spikes is the norm. Each puzzle has a designated number of goo balls that need to make it into the pipe.

Combining the goo balls is as simple as clicking on one and dragging it close to another one. Goo strands will immediately stretch between the balls, and as you move them around, you can see the different ways you can form triangulated bonds. When you click, the goo balls combine. This simplicity makes it appealing to everyone, kids and adults alike.

While young children will initially be able to play (and in the process learn about physics), this is a game best played by tweens, teens and adults who won’t get stymied when the puzzles get harder. The allegorical story that pokes fun at unrestrained capitalism, our concept of beauty and Internet privacy will be lost on little kids.

The game is available at retail or via download for Windows PCs and Macs. The Wii version is only available as a download and offers a unique cooperative mode, which can be fun for families.

“World of Goo” is a masterpiece. Its puzzles are simple in concept and deliciously difficult to solve. With its stunning graphics, endearing building materials, captivating music and quirky sense of humor, this is a game you won’t want to miss.

Gannett