Recently I've been revisiting the good old Game Boy Advance, and while looking up the system's launch titles I unearthed a little game called Iridion 3D.
Iridion 3D was noteworthy upon release for its impressive visuals and high quality soundtrack, but was ultimately panned for unremarkable gameplay. It's also worth noting that review sites are a very poor judge of any given game's quality at the best of times.
While it's true that Iridion 3D is a very basic shooter with only seven levels to offer, it's much more fun than its wikipedia page may imply. What probably makes Iridion 3D's gameplay style feel poor to some people is that the game has the audio and visual style of a 2001 GBA game, but has the gameplay sensabilities of a 1991 Game Boy game. If you're experienced with the kind of nonsense old Game Boy titles used to throw at you, you'll feel very comfortable with Iridion 3D.
Once you are able to finish the game in one go though, that's where the real fun of Iridion 3D starts to come in. Chasing top scores in Iridion 3D is a lot of fun because in order to score high, you have to play agressively in a game that otherwise encourages being cowardly to survive. There's a finite amount of targets you can hit, and unlike other shoot em ups it's actually quite difficult to destroy a lot of the enemies without the strongest weapons possible. Often you'll have just enough time to take an enemy out before it would crash into your ship, meaning that actually scoring any kills takes some technique.
Iridion 3D is also unique from a lot of shoot em ups in that you actually have a health bar. A single shot won't take this ship out! Projectiles take one health away, but objects crashing into you takes three health away. You may find yourself feeling really confident at the start of a level trying to take down a ton of enemies, but as soon as something crashes into you and you lose a big chunk of health, often with no way to heal until you beat the boss, your early greed can rob you of kills later on because now you have to play super carefully until the end of the stage.
You don't want to die or lose too much health either, as at the end of every stage you get a health bonus, and total lives bonus. Each life you have gives you 1000 points at the end of every stage. You start with five, and can only earn three extras for a total life bonus of 8000. So by the time you have all eight lives around the end of level 3, losing a single life can potentially cut your total score down by 4000, and that adds up quickly every time you die as that's more and more thousands of points you're getting robbed of depending on how many levels you still have to beat.
Last night after about a week of practice, I finally got a deathless run while playing pretty aggressively, and got the highest score I've ever gotten. It was a ton of fun, and I'll likely never beat that score. Here's the proof.
This is the typical end of level screen, but on the final level it replaces your level password with the words "Well done!" I still have my 8000 Life bonus, which proves I beat it in one life!
Later that night I finally bumped the difficulty level up to hard, and it's not that great. The only thing that's different is that you take twice as much damage. You don't get more points for playing on hard, and even in the end credits it STILL says "Now play the game again in Hard Mode" as if you had just beaten Normal. It's only there for the personal challenge, which makes me think it was a last minute addition.
This game is absurdly cheap to buy, so if you're a fan of the GBA you might want to give this one a try. It's more fun as a score attack game, so it will take some time and practice before you start to find how strategic the game can be despite it's simple concept.
