ZooCube

"The most interesting puzzle is figuring why it turns unfulfilling."

On first impression it appeared ZooCube would be the sort of puzzle game that would last a while. It was relatively colorful and combined the simplicity and ease of learning necessary for any game you want to play during a quick break with a complex facet, 3-d reasoning. It even seemed to care enough to give me a performance evaluation in addition to my score in the end, although I later disagreed with the formula and found high scores were ranked by some unspecified criteria(probably level achieved.)

It's probably the simplest of any 3-d puzzlers I've seen, but unfortunately it turns out that there are simple reasons to put this down. On the continuum of puzzle games, ones you feel you have to solve regardless of the real world are the best, but ZooCube slips from a game you know you're wasting time on to one you would rather not be wasting too much time on and perhaps even to one you better solve this time or you're going to relegate it to plays during long PlayStation loading screens.

In ZooCube you control something called the ZooCube even though with the GBA graphics it doesn't look like anything special. It appears at the center of the screen and can be rotated about each of its three axes. Three-dimensional shapes will fly towards the ZooCube on the halves of the axes nearest to you so you can, in effect, hide a side of the cube from the gravitating polyhedra. The object is to align the cube so that an incoming shape latches on to one of the similar shape and color. They then disappear, leaving behind goodies along the axis which can be touched by the next incoming shapes for points. You also have the option to cycle shapes attached to the cube(move the one near the cube to the outer reach of one half-axis) as otherwise it'd be very easy for a string of bad luck to wipe you out. The game ends when you have too many shapes coming out of one side, and as you increase in levels and what are probably too many sub-levels, more shapes may latch on, and the game gets faster. Although it allows you a few mulligans: there are three 'smart bombs' you can use(L and R keys at once) to blow one shape from each face of the nexus of your mutated angular shish kebab. 'Use them wisely,' the hints say, and interestingly it's best to use them much earlier than you'd expect.

ZooCube offers interesting opportunities for bonuses and regulates the theoretical part of its challenge well. First, you have a 'next' list which although it is slightly misleading when it considers a just-off-the-screen shape is incoming indicates where the next three shapes will be coming from, usually one from each direction, which allows some intuitive planning. The sub-levels are rigged so that you will always wind up with a chance to have cleared them by the end. Let's imagine that you have twelve different shapes; then, on average, with random shapes selected to latch on to your cube and only sparing pieces that indiscriminately explode the one next to them, you'd have to deal with six of them assuming perfect play(one-half chance any shape has come up an odd number of times.) This is a good way to keep the level interesting; if you manage to clear everything at the start of a sub-level, you get a bonus and an opportunity for a further bonus round, where X shapes are attached to your zoo-cube and X matching shapes will scuttle along the axes to glue themselves to the cube. Wipe them all out and you'll get points while many other icons appear near the base cube. Then if you're clever you can rotate the cube several times and make one shape take out several icons before they disappear. In any case, even if you reach a losing position, you still start the next wave with a clear slate.

There's also a much plainer way to pick up extra points besides zapping the goodies cube pairs leave behind. Simply, if you balance the ZooCube with the same number of blocks on each of the six faces, you score points. Often you can make a run of several in a short period of time, and if you like to gamble, you can even consider trying it instead of matching two shapes together for the big clearance bonus.

The progression is thus well-formulated but it is not always balanced. ZooCube is a game full of curious design choices, the strangest being why each level is named after a body of water. The first level is very easy indeed. You can probably stumble through it by accident and unlock the second level on your first try, but then the sub-levels, which start at 2-5 or 3-5, get more drawn out. By level four you're taking fifteen minutes to get through, and you can't unlock level five until you do. Fatigue and annoyance often set in around level 4-20(each succeeding sub-level gets longer as it introduces more pieces, with no gauge of how far along you are--it's only present in the bonus level, where you don't care) where one small goof can have disastrous snowballing effects. When I make a wrong or slow rotation, there's no gripe with a shape catching on to my structure in the wrong place, but often I'll wind up trying to move too quickly with the auto-descend A button(shapes rotate axes with the cube) just to get on with things and find the level that should be a breeze isn't. It doesn't ever feel like preparation, either. The 'next' feature is not reliable enough, and you have a fraction of a second to decide on several rotations in some cases.

Then the controls seem to be weighted against you. For the Z-axis rotations you need to hold down the L button and game pad, which is awkward, since you have to move your right hand over. Shifting shapes backward and forward is also weird(B and L/B) and I think A and R/A would be better, with B to 'autopilot' a shape and the L/R controlling the third axis. Flipping the cube is the central part of the game and so should be the simplest.

The graphics also have aesthetic and practical problems. As the game starts, the shapes will be pretty easy to discern. A cube is clearly different from a dodecahedron early on, but later you'll find that the shapes shrink as your ZooCube tries to hold more of them. This is necessary for you to see them all without their running off the screen, but on the other hand it's hard to distinguish them except by color. By the end of level 4 you have several that look similar and in fact are tough to distinguish by color due to extensive shading combined with the GBA's relatively low resolution. It gets to the point where you won't be able to tell an octahedron from an icosahedron, and even the gadget shapes they throw in such as claws and springs don't really help, and they seem to be out of place. Yet some of the shapes were on the right track: the two-toned soccer balls are clearly differentiable, and perhaps striped or checkered solids with clear motifs(i.e. green/red) could vary the colors enough that you don't have to squint to have a chance at differentiating shapes. The color coding still mostly works, but it's vital that the computer be perfect communication your situation as a puzzle game requires more speed. And when you are near the end, the entire skewer of shapes piled on one face turns grey, so you'll need a very good memory to recall if that small shape that looks roughly like what's next will in fact get eliminated and restore color. Not pretty--two toned shapes that instead acquire a streak of grey might alleviate this.

But the worst part may be the freezes that occur when there's a close call, i.e. you are cycling the shapes attached to the cube while one is about to land. They're infrequent but they do put in perspective the general 'my puzzle game doesn't understand me' where I thought I got something done just in time but the game didn't seem to process it that way.

Compared to this the bonus levels turning dark and hard to see are relatively less serious, but by the end the game really tries to dazzle when holding with the abstract limits it originally imposed would still have offered plenty of good possibilities. The end result seems to be the game equivalent of some young aspiring author sick of writing stories he hopes are Hemingway and instead plunging into 'experimental' stuff that shoots first and adds punctuation later, if at all. And the animals that apparently appear when you match two shapes(GameCube reviews indicate this) are completely indecipherable in the fishbowl that is the GBA screen.

I can't really recommend forking over much money for ZooCube. It's a fun game in limited doses, and many of the tasks to maximize your points combine quick reflexes with learning to ingrain mathematical reasoning, but I am more relieved than proud when I think of the bargain price I got it for on eBay. Its basic flaws, and the limitations of the system it's on, mean that something which seems perfect for a quick pick-me-up also quickly loses its novelty and strong initial appeal. In a bit of time, when the used GameCube market becomes bigger, I imagine this would be a good pick-up barring catastrophic bug oversights; you wouldn't have to squint at the screen or worry about nasty details to get through the game. Until then, by which time a more refined sequel would not be surprising, don't expect much if you buy the GBA version.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM
--shapes are fun at first
--not too esoteric 3-d puzzler
--bonus rounds and point accumulation logical
--intuitive and likable overall

AXIS OF EVIL
--gets hard and drags on too much
--interminable sublevels
--parts of design are very bad
--odd controls

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/02, Updated 12/07/02