EA Mobile on Boom Blox: 'Steven Spielberg is a big, big fan of mobile games'

When we first heard about Boom Blox, the puzzler that EA is releasing for Wii and mobile in collaboration with Steven Spielberg, we were frankly doubtful about just how much involvement he'd have with the mobile version.

However, according to EA Mobile when I visited its offices recently, such cynicism was unjustified. "He's been visiting the LA studio every week," said EA's Debi Coster.

"He has been very much involved in the creation of the game. He's had creative design input, he's maintained an overview, and he's not been afraid to say, 'I don't want that, I want this'. And he's had the same oversight on the mobile development."

"He's a big big fan of mobile games," director of marketing Tim Harrison chipped in. Apparently EA Mobile's LA staff have been lording it over their UK colleagues with tales of hob-nobbing with the director. Interestingly, his son Max actually works at EA as a (non-mobile) game designer.

Anyway, what about Boom Blox? We've got the first screenshots of the mobile version above, and I've played it. The game is a puzzler that mirrors the Wii version in the general gameplay, albeit in 2D instead of 3D.

It essentially involves a playing field full of starred boxes and other objects, and you have to throw metal balls at them to knock the boxes off-screen and score points.

Except, of course, there's more strategy to it than that, since you can blast objects into other objects to cause chain reactions. There are bombs, for example, which send everything flying – and your job is to work out where to fire your first metal ball to cause as much carnage as possible.

There'll be 40 levels in the game, but the big deal as far as EA Mobile is concerned is the connectivity. The game has a built-in editor for you to create your own levels, which you can then upload to the Boom Blox community if your operator allows that feature.

(I didn't realise that some operators don't allow this kind of connectivity, incidentally. It's something we'll be checking out as we review more of these connected games.)

Anyway, my first reaction was to wonder how popular this feature will be, but the point is that if only one per cent of players use the level editor, that should mean a huge supply of new levels for the other 99 per cent to download.

"Some of the levels I've seen on this are outrageous," says product manager Jamie Conners. "You can construct something really quite elaborate. Yet these levels are only about 300 bytes – not even a kilobyte – so you don't have a worry with data charges."

Interestingly, Boom Blox could be the start of a wider EA Mobile community covering several games, says Coster, where players could have one login for all the publisher's connected titles (for example, the upcoming Spore).

Boom Blox is an early glimpse at that, with connected features including the ability to rate other people's created levels by giving them the thumbs-up or thumbs-down (this also helps players decide which ones to download).

The game is out next month, so click 'Track It!', won't you? Go on, do it now and we'll send you an alert once we review it.