You have one minute to reach 88 miles per hour before being trapped forever at the bottom of the leaderboards in Telltale Games' Back to the Future: Blitz Through Time, now available on Facebook.
It's Bejeweled Blitz with a Back to the Future twist, and there's nothing wrong with that. Back to the Future: Blitz Through Time is the first entry in a new strategy for the adventure game experts at Telltale, releasing free casual social games in advance of their major releases.
"By aligning a social gaming component with our upcoming launch of Back to the Future: The Game on various platforms, we will utilize the drawing power of social media to maximize the effectiveness of all our efforts with the franchise," said Steve Allison, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Telltale Games. "This extension to our product launches is a decisive step in our growth strategy to establish closer connections to our consumers. Social gaming is also a great medium for breaking through competitive noise and the confusion of media fragmentation so that we can communicate directly with a focused, pre-qualified consumer."
The gameplay is simple: Match colored molecules in order to start a chemical reaction in your flux capacitor, powering the engine. When the engine hits 88 miles per hour, the player warps to a new era, unlocking score multipliers. If the scoring chain breaks, however, the speed is reset, and the player's chance at successful navigating the time stream plummet.
All I know is it has the Back to the Future theme playing, and it's something to do while waiting for the first episode in the five-part Back to the Future adventure game to be released next month. That's good enough for me.