This game will have you hooked for a long time
Zuma is a kind of puzzle game, very similar to Bust-a-Move, but with some twists to the formula. Basically, you must use a ball-shooting frog to fire balls into a chain. When you put three balls of the same color together, they disappear and give you points. One can also create combo, because balls are linked by other balls of the same color, or chains, when you just make balls disappear three after three. And let's not forget about bonus balls, which give you an advantage. But beware, because the chain proceeds slowly towards a hole, and if the balls reach it, it's over. And while you go forward in the game, new colors enter, and the levels become more and more difficult, making this a hard game. There are two modes: Adventure, which is like a story-mode, where the player must solve various levels, and Gauntlet, where balls continuosly enter in the level, and your only purpose is to score as much as possible without dying.
As you can see, it's not so different from the basic idea of Bust-a-Move, but that's not a problem, because BaM is great fun. But the differences made the game even better. First of all, one doesn't have all the time he wants to think, because balls proceed continuosly. The concept of "chained balls on a rail" brings a breath of fresh air to the genre, because it allows the player to score combo on one side, and to remain stuck in between two curves on another (usually the rail on which the ball-chain runs makes lots of loops around you). Also, new balls continue to enter into the level unless you score a certain amount of points, which somewhat makes you need to go faster, at least in the beginning.
The technical side doesn't really matter in a XBLA game, but it's still there: the graphics are nice to look at, moreso if you have a big screen TV. The sound effects are normal, but the tunes eventually grow on you, and the voices are funny.
Like every Xbox 360 game, there are achievements that can be collected by meeting particular requirements. Some of them are easy, other hard, but the purpose is the same: to give the player another reason to go forward. Not that we needed one, because the game is addictive enough as it is. The online chart makes things even more interesting, because there's always someone better than you, and you want to beat that someone. Unless you are first place, but that means you must've been playing a lot. Zuma it's fast-paced, and some "thinking" people may not like it. But it's surely a good concept, executed in a great way. While it costs 800GP (double than the usual XBLA game), it definately delivers. Try the demo version first, though, because it's not for everyone.