Orb 3-D

"I can think of two things wrong with this title"

Orb-3D is yet another variation of Pong. To win this game, you have to bounce a malformed sphere through the board and touch certain objects in a certain way to advance to the next level 30 times. To win in life, discontinue reading this review.

Story
An evil super powerful magician named Khron threatens the existence of this entire galaxy. Since no one else with extensive training in both sorcery and piloting skills will fight this magician or for that matter even bother to play this game, it is up to you to pilot a spaceship that...runs on gas...and stop this...magician...to save the galaxy.

Gameplay
Khron unleashes destructive forces upon you such as bowling ball pins, dice, angry faces, letters of the alphabet, and a tic-tac-toe board. Use up and down direction buttons to move the paddles parallel to each other vertically. You hit button A to decrease the size of your ship to one-tenth its original size to activate these objects and have the orb return to its original position. This is the amazing ''3d'' as hyped in the game title. Once in a while when you hit something, you're given another orb to play with. I hate this because it prolongs this game and therefore the misery. Button B takes you to a screen to refuel, but you have to reset this game if you don't touch anything due to a glitch in the game.

Most of the puzzles are simple to solve, but others just don't make sense, resulting in just hitting random objects to advance. In one of the levels, it took me awhile to realize that pink animal was a rat, so the cycle to victory is - rat - elephant - cat -. I didn't know elephants hated cats so much!

Graphics
How can you screw up bubbles? Seriously, it's just numbers, shields, and ducks. Nothing too inspiring about the graphics. The orb was terribly made like the rest of this game.

Sound
Annoying! The intro theme sounds ripped off from a 70s horror movie on a $100 budget. Then the same game theme is repeated 30 times for your pleasure. Sort of catchy the first time, ear-bleeding after the tenth time. The music will loop at least 100 times before you beat this game.

Overall
This game is neat for 5 minutes if you like simple puzzles. The first level is really terrible, and I'm surprised they used it this early in the game. You'd think Hi Tech Expressions would show us the glitter of this game up front to spark interest in gamers that are renting or demoing it at a store to buy Orb-3D, but it's too bad the glitter color is actually grey. This game is as dull as this review and repetitive with irritating sound.

Gameplay: 3
Graphics: 2
Sound: 2
Replayablity: 3
Overall: 2.5 (rounded to 3)
Rent or Buy? Not worth the effort to push the start button.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/01, Updated 09/15/01