To prevent the balls from reaching the skull, the player can eliminate the balls by firing a colored ball from the stone frog idol's mouth towards the chain of balls that will continue to push forward until the player fills the yellow bar, which is when the balls will stop producing off-screen. As soon as one ball reaches the skull, the others follow and the player loses a life. The player can carry two balls at a time and can switch at any time.
The objective of Zuma is to eliminate all of the balls rolling around the screen along a given path (the path is clearly visible in all of the levels except for the last level) with other balls before these balls reach the yellow skull structure, which will open to varying degrees as a warning of oncoming balls. Zuma received the 2004 'Game of the Year' award from RealArcade.
It is also included with the PlayStation 3 retail version of Bejeweled 3, along with Feeding Frenzy 2. Īn enhanced version, called Zuma Deluxe, was released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X as well as an Xbox Live Arcade download for the Xbox 360 and a PlayStation Network download for the PlayStation 3. It was released for a number of platforms, including PDAs, mobile phones, and the iPod. Zuma is a tile-matching puzzle video game published by PopCap Games.