Some of you may be familiar with a Pogo.com, a website for playing online games. Usually, you play in chat rooms with other people, while you earn tokens. Pogo Island is a compilation on the DS of five popular games from Pogo.com. With Pogo Island you have fun on the run playing Poppit!, Tri-Peaks Solitaire, Word Whomp, Squelchies and Phlinx.

For those of you that have not played these games before, here is a quick overview.

Poppit! has a bunch of colored balloons. Some hold little goodies. If at least two balloons of the same color are immediately adjacent (not diagonal) you can pop them. All adjacent matching colors will also pop and the other balloons will all move up. You're trying to leave as few balloons as possible before you run out of pops.

Tri-Peaks Solitaire is an interesting little card game. You have three little pyramids of cards with only the bottom row of cards face up. At the bottom of the screen your deck is all face down except for the top card. Your objective is to select cards (color doesn't matter) that go sequentially up or down from your starter card. For example, I have a 3 showing as my starter card. From any of the exposed cards I could select a 2 or a 4. From there I could go say 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 3 or 2, A, K, Q, A, 2. My goal is too clear all of the cards from at least two of the pyramids before I run out of cards in my deck. This was a new game to me, but it's come to be one of my favorites.

Word Whomp is a combination of word scramble and whack-a-mole. You have six little gophers each carrying a different letter. The grid above shows how many 3, 4, 5 and 6 letter words you can make out of the letters the gophers are showing. You want to make as many words as possible before time runs out. You get a bonus for finding all of the words. There's a little hint mode (which costs you time on the clock) and you can re-scramble the letters to see if that helps. Word Whomp is easily my long time favorite.

I found Squelchies to be the most frustrating. There's a crab at the bottom of the screen and columns of little colored squelchies above him. You drag squelchies to be next to other squelchies of the same color. You need at least four matching squelchies to make them the group go poof. Once a squelchie is next to another of the same color, it grabs on so that you'll be moving your little squelchies as a group. There are little special items buried within the columns of squelchies that do different things. The squelchies are steadily moving down the screen so you're trying your best to clear them before they reach the bottom.

Phlinx is kind of set on a pirate ship. You have a cannon that shoots different colored cannon balls. You have various colored matching balls above you. You need to get three like colors touching to make them disappear. Anything below the set you remove that isn't otherwise attached to the top of the screen will fall and earn you points. Bonus balls will drop down and become available for you to shoot from your cannon. The neat thing is that you adjust your aim with the stylus and can set your shots to ricochet off the walls and get into areas that would be otherwise unreachable. I had a lot of fun playing Phlinx.

The game loaded quickly and I was happy to discover that there are three save game slots. I hate getting a game that only one person can play at a time. It makes for a certain amount of stress when you have a child in the house that wants to play the same games mommy is playing.

Once in the game, I'm confronted with a number of choices. I have Quick Play, Island Adventure, Multiplayer, Token Transfer, Help, Hints & Tips and Extras. Since I felt like being a little contrary today, I started at the bottom of the list and worked my way up this time.

Extras has a Poppit! demo that you can share with another DS player. Your player profiles (saved games) are listed here. There's a Captain's Log to display any of the badges you've earned during your game play. I find that there are eight possible badges to earn on each of the five games. Finally, there's Credits so you can read the names and job titles of the fine folks that brought these oh-so-addictive games to my DS.

The Help, Hints & Tips area is actually a good place to start. You'll get an overview of the ranks within the game (based on the number of tokens you've earned), information on the Island Adventure story/game, and some nice hints on each of the games you'll be playing. Out of all the games, Squelchies was the trickiest one for me so I really appreciated having some place to read a little bit about the game.

Just as you do when playing online Pogo games, you also earn tokens while playing the Pogo Island games. Pogo Island is actually set up so that if you have a Pogo account and a Wi-Fi connection, you can transfer the tokens earned on the DS onto your online game. If you are an avid collector of tokens, this is definitely one of the options that will make you drool. Now, not only can you play one of your favorite Pogo games while you're waiting for an appointment or stuck in line somewhere, you can keep earning points to fuel your online addiction. Woohoo!

The Multiplayer mode has a shareable version of Word Whomp, as well as a Party Play mode where you can pass your DS around taking turns with up to three of your friends to see who can earn the most points. You'll get to enter your name, pick one of six mascots, and then choose which of the games you want to play. I could see this being very handy if you were waiting in the aforementioned line along with multiple children. Depending on the kid, this could be just the thing to keep them occupied while you wait.

Island Adventure is the story arc portion of Pogo Island. Six pogo mascots are out sailing on the SS Pogo and having a wild time, when that crazy parrot forgets to steer and crashes the gang into a deserted island. Captain Parrot sends the others out to look for parts to repair the ship. Your job is to find all five friends and the four items necessary to repair the ship. You'll have a little spinner you whirl with your stylus to move and then you'll face different challenges as you move across the island. Basically you're playing a board game to move you between the Pogo games and construction challenges. And all the while you earn tokens to raise your island ranking share with your online account. It probably only took me a few hours to play completely through the Island Adventure. While you can play all of the individual games in Quick Play, the Island Adventure is the only place you'll see the four construction mini-games.

At last, back to Quick Play and the top of the menu. I like Quick Play. I can immediately jump into any of the five games. I did not have to unlock them by playing Island Adventure first. That was a very smart decision on the part of the developers. Now you can unlock some goodies in Island Adventure, don't get me wrong, but you have immediate access to any of the main games. The Island Adventure is not required. After I've selected my game, I can set the difficulty level to Easy, Medium or Hard.

As I earn my tokens, either in Island Adventure or Quick Play, when I achieve a certain number of tokens I also get the option to take a Jackpot spin. There's a golden idol critter as your jackpot. The little colored circles around its head light up as it 'spins'. Click stop when you're ready. A random amount of gold coins will cascade out of the idol's mouth. You'll earn a random amount of bonus tokens. I've seen as few as 20 and as many as about 200.

On the whole, I've found Pogo Island to be irresistibly addictive. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your work load and personality - that's for you to decide. All I can say is that I'm having tons of fun and I very highly recommend Pogo Island.