Insect-themed marble popper Tumblebugs pinging onto mobile

Can you ever have too much of a Good Thing(TM)? Actually, what seems to happen is the more of the Good Thing(TM) people enjoy, the more variation on the Good Thing(TM) the people demand. That's the reason you can't move in game shops at present for first-person shooters, first-person shooters about World War II, first-person shooters about aliens, football games and DS games about babies and horses.

And so to the 'marble popper' genre of games. Depending how hardcore you are, it was invented by Japanese outfit Mitchell with its 1998 game Puzz Loop, or invented as Zuma by PopCap in 2003. Certainly, it was PopCap that made it a casual gaming phenomenon. Then along came MumboJumbo with its also highly successful Luxor variant. And since then there's been Atlantis Sky Patrol, Zum-Zum, Abracadaball and Poppin' Panda, amongst others.

So why not another version? Taking the design into a garden setting, you play as Tumble – some sort of big bug who rotates around the middle of the screen – firing out coloured tumblebugs to create groups of three or more of the same colour in the long line of bugs that are being pushed by an evil Black Bug into a hole…

Whatever. You get the idea.

Despite the general clunking theme, Tumblebugs has done well on the web with over 35 million downloads claimed by developer Wildfire Studio and publisher RealArcade since its winter 2005 release. And now it seems it's about time it came over to mobile.

The beauty of these games should be their one-thumb control method, while developer Tag Games also promises 3D visuals, 60 levels spread across eight different environments plus an extensive achievements system.

We'll get to see how smoothly Tumblebugs plays compared to the competition sometime around April or May 2009.