Sometimes, they say, ''less is more.'' But in Mega-Maze, less is certainly less. The minimalist approach of this production squanders a delightful idea and some clever level-designs.
In Mega-Maze, you try to guide a blue marble from its starting point to a flashing hole, avoiding pits, enemy marbles, and dealing with various tricks and traps.
The basic idea is that Mega-Maze is like one of those old wooden labyrinth games. Lean it to the right and everything -- you, the evil balls, etc. -- rolls right until it hits a wall, a trap, or another ball. So the emphasis is not so much on finding a path to the exit, but in actually using it: you'll usually need to use the purple balls to bridge gaps, open doors, or smash one another to clear a path.
Therein lies the game's most significant problem. While leaning the board is an inherently 3-D proposition, since it makes one side of the maze ''higher'' than the other, the game is shown in a flat 2-D perspective. When you tilt, there is no feedback on the screen, except for the movement of the balls. To observers, the playfield objects move wildly of their own accord. It's easy to imagine how an overhead 3-D perspective, like that used in Marble Madness or the Saturn's upcoming Tama would have helped this game. Such a view would let you actually see what you're doing!
In fact, the overall audio-visual approach to the game is utterly spartan. There's no background music, barely a half dozen sound-effects, the balls' rolling isn't animated, and finishing a screen just gives you a fade-to-black (instead of, say, an animation showing the ball dropping from one maze into the next).
The game has 75 levels, each made up of one, two, or three individual mazes. Finishing a level gives you a code to return to the next one in a future session (groan -- why couldn't they use the machine's storage to save the highest level achieved, like The Apprentice does?).
Mega-Maze does have a strength, and that's the level-designs. Rather than the tedious epic-length levels of Dimo's Quest, the levels in Mega-Maze are short and sweet, requiring you to devise a clever solution, look for a non-intuitive fix, or just move really fast.
But ultimately, there just isn't enough here to keep you coming back for more. This simple game hardly merits a CD-ROM format and a $30 asking price -- with its lack of sound and graphics, it could probably fit on a floppy disc if developed for personal computers. In fact, the game seems more like a decent PC shareware title than a commercial software release.
Mega-Maze has its fans, and with its intriguing game-play, it deserves a few. But I think most puzzle fans will find it slow going. Personally, I'd recommend Dimo's Quest or Lemmings instead.
[Thanks, Chris Adamson]