While only the player's board can be seen, his competitors can be seen on a little track on the side of the board, showing where he ranks amongst his competitors. Then there's the party mode, in which sixteen players can all play at once online. There's Blitz battle in which two players can face off, both online and offline, with two boards next to each other. What makes the game so special is that Popcap has included several styles of online gameplay. Some players actually reset a game immediately if they don't like the initial board setup! This is something, however, that players cannot do in multiplayer. Since each game is a minute, you'll find yourself playing twenty or thirty games in a row without realizing it, trying to get that perfect game. (Matching 6 or more, which can only be done as part of a combo, results in a rare gem that shoots out three rows of lightning in each direction.) Unlike regular Twist, the Blitz version allows players to rotate in both directions, which is a gameplay balancing mechanic, given how fast the game is. Twist is Bejeweled, but instead of matching gems by swapping adjacent cubes, you rotate a group of four, and should you match a row of 5, instead of a hypercube you get a lightning cube that sends out lightning in four directions. If that weren't enough, there's a Bejeweled Twist varient included as well.
When 60 seconds are up, all unmatched special gems activate for bonus points, and the game ends. Creating special gem matches of 4 and 5 cause a multiplayer gem to appear, which will multiply the value of the gem matches. If you match gems fast enough, you maintain a string - when you falter, the string is broken. That's basic Bejeweled 2, but the Blitz part comes in the form that you have to constantly match gems as fast as you can. Building a row of four gems creates an explosive gem, while five creates a hypercube that will eliminate all of the same color gems you match it with. The base game is basically unchanged: you move a single gem to create a match of at least three gems, which cause them to vanish. This is the same game you've seen on Facebook, but with a ton of online game modes as well as a surprising co-op aspect that makes the game competitive across the entire Xbox Live Community. This has proven to be a natural for Xbox Live Arcade and its robust online multiplayer as Bejeweled Blitz LIVE has arrived. Bejeweled Blitz was the Facebook offspring that took the normally placid, Zen-like activity into a sweaty, pulse-pounding blast that forced you to make as many matches as you could in a single minute. It was a twist on Columns, basically taking the game away from its Tetris roots and purifying the "match three" gameplay mechanic. Bejeweled, the game that got Popcap Games started on the road to dominating the casual game universe.