'World of Goo' offers balls of sticky fun

— -- 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 these 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.

The challenge comes from the physics involving this gooey building material. As an elastic and jiggly substance, it creates structures that resemble Jell-O. If a structure is stressed too much in one direction or another, it will collapse. Because unattached balls of goo like to climb on these structures, particularly at the top, you have to factor in their weight.

Adding to the fun (and challenge) is different colored goo balls that have special abilities. Some harden when stuck together and then can't be moved, while others can be plucked out of structures to be repositioned. Some look like water drops and have the ability to stretch a great distance. Others can be ignited, causing chain reactions. And some can be filled with a heliumlike substance to make them float.