Q*bert's Qubes

"Roll 'dem bones, Q*B!"

You know QBert, right? Snorkely looking, round, orange dude who screams foul gibberish when he loses, right? Hops around on stepped pyramids to make them all one color? There was even a Playstation remake of the original game last year, and it blew chunks. Except for raw graphical quality, QBert's Qubes was a much better QBert than either the original or the playstation remake.

Instead of hopping around on a stepped pyramid, QBert hopped around on a pyramid of loose, floating, dice-like cubes. As QBert hopped off of a cube, it rotated once in the direction of the hop. Each cube face potentially had a different color, and the goal of each level was to rotate all the cubes so that they matched the faces of a model cube shown in the upper right hand corner. To prevent the task from being too complicated, cubes' positions would be ''locked-down'' as soon as you completed all the cubes in any row, be it a diagonal, vertical or horizontal row. QBerts two nephews showed up occasionally, and would rotate your cubes randomly as they hopped around until you caught them. IN addition, the enemies that pursued you in the original Q*Bert were back, and avoiding these while keeping your progress with the puzzle intact was a challenge in and of itself. This sounds hard, but was actually quite fun, with very fast gameplay and great graphics.

Like most of the best action-puzzle games, the difficulty ramped up slowly. Early on, cubes only have two colors, and rotating them to assume the correct position is easy. Occurances of enemies and relatives are likewise more rare and easily handled early on. But as the stages progress the game adds colors to the cubes one at a time until eventually the cubes are covered with six completely seperate colors, making the job of matching the sides very challenging indeed! Simultaneous to the color-count increase, the puzzles grow mroe and more infested with enemies, and your nephews begin showing up quite a bit more frequently. As everything has a distinctive sound effect, these later and more crowded levels present a cacophanous auditory experience that is really quite satisfying in and of itself.

While the character sprites were pretty good for the time, the cubes were the big stand-out and programmer's showcase of thise game.
The cubes boasted incredibly smooth animation and were convincingly 3D. They tumbled in all directions so smoothly that they easily could've been polygonal in nature. It's more likely that they were traditionally animated however.

The traditional stack-hopping horde of enemies were back from the original, and required careful hopping to avoid. Frustrating,

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/03