Iridion 3D

by Majesco

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005BJ9B
• Item Weight: 5 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: June 11, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,032 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Iridion 3D is reminiscent of arcade shooters such as Galaga or Gradius, except that Iridion is done in over-the-shoulder third-person 3-D. The problem is that this perspective really, really hurts the gameplay. One can only wonder how much better Iridion 3D might have been had the developers chosen a more workable point of view.

Your ship sometimes blocks your sightline as you shoot, and it's extremely difficult to accurately gauge distance and depth perception. Is that a small enemy that's close to my ship (maybe even about to collide with it), or is it a large one that's farther away? Are they shooting at me or are those "shots" actually distant ships? Are those enemies or part of the tunnel scenery? Another problem is the jerky control. If you're flying through a tunnel trying to kill the bad guys, you should be able to literally fly in circles. With the Game Boy Advance directional pad, squares are about all you can manage.

At least the game is extremely pretty to look at. Iridion 3D boasts one of the best graphics engines available for the Game Boy Advance, and considering the competition, that's no idle compliment. Progressing through the stages and worlds one is bombarded with beautiful scenery almost as much as enemy fire.

Yes, the game looks spectacular, and it will partially appease arcade shooter fans waiting for Game Boy Advance conversions of classics such as R-Type and the aforementioned coin-ops. It's just too important to see what you're doing in a game of this type to recommend the title to anyone but the most hard-core fans of the genre. --Andrew S. Bub

Pros:

• Gorgeous graphics and explosions

Cons:

• Your ship blocks your view
• It's difficult to accurately gauge depth and distance
• The controls aren't well suited to this style of play

Product Description

Iridion 3D is reminiscent of arcade shooters such as Galaga or Gradius, except that Iridion is done in over-the-shoulder third-person 3-D. The problem is that this perspective really, really hurts the gameplay. One can only wonder how much better Iridion 3D might have been had the developers chosen a more workable point of view.

Your ship sometimes blocks your sightline as you shoot, and it's extremely difficult to accurately gauge distance and depth perception. Is that a small enemy that's close to my ship (maybe even about to collide with it), or is it a large one that's farther away? Are they shooting at me or are those "shots" actually distant ships? Are those enemies or part of the tunnel scenery? Another problem is the jerky control. If you're flying through a tunnel trying to kill the bad guys, you should be able to literally fly in circles. With the Game Boy Advance directional pad, squares are about all you can manage.

At least the game is extremely pretty to look at. Iridion 3D boasts one of the best graphics engines available for the Game Boy Advance, and considering the competition, that's no idle compliment. Progressing through the stages and worlds one is bombarded with beautiful scenery almost as much as enemy fire.

Yes, the game looks spectacular, and it will partially appease arcade shooter fans waiting for Game Boy Advance conversions of classics such as R-Type and the aforementioned coin-ops. It's just too important to see what you're doing in a game of this type to recommend the title to anyone but the most hard-core fans of the genre. --Andrew S. Bub

Pros:

• Gorgeous graphics and explosions

Cons:

• Yo

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Put out first so people will buy it, June 5, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Leominster, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iridion 3D (Video Game)

Having bought an import GBA, I was grabbing at any chance I had to get a new game for it. It was too expensive to buy many import games, so I had to wait like anyone else for a new game. So, when Majescos titles hit the sales floor, I grabbed this one, looking to be the most exciting of the bunch (having already played the highly mediocre Pitfall remake and beating Earthworm Jim.) Little did I know I was falling for one of the oldest tricks in the books. People will be lining up for new GBA games even before the system comes out, so if your game is first on the shelf, it will probably sell. Majesco knew it had some mediocre titles, so they put them out extremely early to help guarantee sales, and it shows.

First the good things. I heard that it had incredible scaling effects, but I never expected this. It is gorgeous at first. It will knock your socks off. Then, you start to notice how repetitive the game is. Each level is unique in the flight zone, but never changes. And, from lack of anything better, it has a password function.

And on to the bad. This game is no fun to play. It is extremely difficult and aggrivating. The powerups are non-existant and hardly add any power to your ship. And there is hardly any reward for knocking out fighters, because they still tend to hit you, so all you do is avoid getting hit 90% of the time. There is no fun to it and is too frustrating to be played often, killing the replay value.

So my opinion is to only get this one as a show-off of the insanely good graphics of the system, but dont let the person play more than 2 minutes or theyll get the wrong impression of this great new handheld. Just sit back and wait the wekk until Castlevania and F-Zero come out and catch this one in the clearance racks in a month.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars More fun than... Nothing, July 30, 2003

By 

D. Rose - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Iridion 3D (Video Game)

I got Iridion 3D from amazon.com the other day ..., and thought I'd post a little review of it.

In short for the skimmers, I'm having more fun writing this review than I did playing the game.

The story of the game goes something like this:

Show picture of city
Show picture of battleship
Show 1, no... 2, no.... 3!! blips on a radar screen
Show distressed guy in control room
Show city again
Show UFO over city!
Show 3 evil space ships shooting city!
Show two buildings of the city on fire!!

Yes, that is literally how the introduction cinematic plays out, scene by scene. But before you see that, you watch 20 seconds of logos by the companies that made the game (they are non-skippable of course).

After that you are given a menu with a couple of options:

Start
Options
Password

Yes, that's right, the game has no memory at all. It doesn't save your options settings, and it doesn't save your progress in the levels. When you complete a level you are given a 9 digit code to write down in order to start the game from that level in the future. Amazingly, when you turn the game off and on again, that code still works, so it is obviously hard-coded into the game. But who is going to carry around a pad of paper with them so they can "save" and "load" their game? This may have been acceptable back in the days of the NES when you sat at home and could actually write down numbers, but the GBA is a portable game machine.

So after you press start or enter your password to start where you left off, you enter a level. The level names are quite creative... here are a few of them:

Dogfight above the Ocean
Air Combat above the Clouds
Escape through the Disposal tunnel

Yes, those are the real names of the levels. I think they fit in nicely with the storyline, don't you?

Upon entering a level, you begin moving forwards through the tunnel or over the ocean or above the clouds. You hold down the A button to start shooting, then you move up, down, left and right randomly. Repeat until you finish the game.

By holding the A button down, you reach the maximum firing rate of your ship. You don't even have to tap the shoot button really fast to shoot faster. Just holding down the A button is as fast as you can get. Then you move around, trying not to get shot by the other ships. The only problem with this is, your ship is so big and the angle so wrong, you can't even see the bullets that are coming at you half the time. In order to shoot an enemy ship, you have to position your own ship directly in front of them because of the perspective of the game, but in doing this, you completely block the enemy ship out of view and can't tell if you are hitting him or not, or if he is shooting at you. After 30 seconds of this, you quickly realize that it isn't worth it to try and shoot the other ships, so you just start hiding in a corner of the screen so you can actually see the bullets before they hit you.

However, this raises another problem. The field of depth in the game is completely wrong, and it is quite nearly impossible to tell when a bullet is about to hit you. When a bullet looks it is 300 "game feet" away from you, it is actually about 2 feet in front of your ship, and is about to hit you. Plus because your ship is so big, you don't even see half the bullets before they hit you.

Needless to say, this all makes the game terribly unfun to play, because you really have no way of avoiding a bullet that you can't see, or that looks like it should not hit you for another 2 seconds.

The boss battles are a little more varied, but still revolve around you trying to dodge their bullets while strafing back and forth enough to hit them until they die. But at least they are different, and allow you to see a few more visual tricks and treats.

The game is actually pretty easy once you realize that you should just focus on dodging bullets rather than trying to shoot at anything. I got to the 4th level out of 7 in less than 10 minutes. Sadly I don't think I will beat the game, because it is simply too boring to waste time on.

The one good thing I can comment on about the game is the graphics. They really are quite amazing for a GBA game, especially considering it was a launch title. The framerates are extremely smooth, and the graphics, though they are all 2D bitmaps, really give an excellent illusion of being 3D. Each level is unique, and matches the level description perfectly (Air combat above the clouds, for example).

Overall this is easily the worst GBA game I have played, and I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had payed any more than the [$$] I paid for it, I would consider suing the company that designed it to get my 10 minutes back.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read Review, May 19, 2001

By 

Ron Cheng (New City, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iridion 3D (Video Game)

Iridion 3-D is one of the few original Majesco games releasing for the US launch of the Game Boy Advance. A spin on the classic side-scrolling shooter, Iridion 3-D puts you in a single ship that must shoot its way through a horde of futuristic environments complete with traps, enemies, and obstacles. We recently had a chance to sit down with a near-final build of the game to see how Iridion 3-D stacks up against the rest of the genre. Iridion 3-D doesn't have much of a storyline. You're a futuristic fighter pilot who must shoot his way through a series of environments in an effort to defend Earth from a horrible enemy invasion. The game doesn't exactly explain who the enemy is, or why you're fighting them, but the lack of details is quickly forgotten when you get into the action of the game. Iridion 3-D plays very similarly to your standard side-scrolling or top-down shooter. You play as a jet, and you must move back and forth and shoot your weapons at the enemies that fly at you. Killing certain enemies will leave power-ups behind, and picking them up will equip your fighter with better weapons. The game currently has at least three types of power-ups, and most of them are slightly different versions of the classic weapon power-ups found in other shooters. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be any special bombs or missiles in the game, and the secondary button didn't do anything. Additionally, at this point, the control isn't as precise as we would have liked, and we found that the fighter would often float a few millimeters to the left or right after we stopped pressing the D-pad.

The graphics in the game look very good, and the game runs at a very slick frame rate. Unfortunately, there are no alternate view modes, and the behind-the-ship perspective frequently obscures the action and makes it difficult to gauge exactly where incoming fire is headed. The sound is pretty awesome, and it really takes advantage of the GBA's superior sound technology with some hot music and sound effects.

At this point, Iridion 3-D looks like it could be a great game for fans of the genre. With its unique perspective and the classic gameplay that makes shooters such great pick-up-and-play games, Iridion 3-D should balance out the GBA launch lineup swimmingly.