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The Amazing Maze Game (Arcade) artwork

The Amazing Maze Game (Arcade) review


"Connoisseurs of minimalism, rejoice - your idol rests here. It is a 24x26 square with openings at each end, and two nameless, faceless, worthless icons squaring off (no pun intended) against each other in a race to the finish. The box is filled with lines representing walls which are spaced just so, allowing your geometric figure to wend its way through corridors as black as the infinite vacuum of space. What reward lies at the end of these bleak hallways? None. Does hope spring eternal for our ..."

Connoisseurs of minimalism, rejoice - your idol rests here. It is a 24x26 square with openings at each end, and two nameless, faceless, worthless icons squaring off (no pun intended) against each other in a race to the finish. The box is filled with lines representing walls which are spaced just so, allowing your geometric figure to wend its way through corridors as black as the infinite vacuum of space. What reward lies at the end of these bleak hallways? None. Does hope spring eternal for our angular protagonist outside these walls? Don't be silly. This is the Amazing Maze Game, one of the foremost crown jewels of primitive arcade anti-fun, which fails to live up to two-thirds of its title.

Operating my toaster is a more complicated procedure than playing this game, so if you need to be told how, I can deduce with a fair amount of certainty that you wear diapers and have not graduated to solid foods yet. You are Square, located on the right side of the screen. Sadly, even this basic fact may be easily lost on people playing the game for the first time, such as this reviewer, who for a few minutes wondered why he seemed to have no control over the lethargy exhibited by the ceaselessly moving character on the left side of the screen. That character is Diamond, your antagonist, who is endowed with full knowledge of all the paths in these randomly created labyrinths, but chooses to yank your chain by initially moving at a crawl. If you last long enough to win two mazes in a row, you will see that he tires of these psychological mind games about as quickly as you do.

Although the limit is three mazes, or as many as you can win consecutively, it's easy to grow weary of this travesty before that. Navigating a maze with a highly impersonal rectilinear icon as your avatar wasn't fun twenty years before this game came out. It's about as close as the Amish would ever get to playing video games, if in fact they did. Imagination forsook this game ages ago, and whether that's the fault of the developers or the material itself is open to debate. It's understandably difficult to make a maze seem imaginative when it's being programmed on a computer with the processing power of sheet rock, but if that's the case, why even do it in the first place? A paddle-ball is more advanced, and the thrill is just as cheap. It comes highly recommended.



snowdragon's avatar
Community review by snowdragon (November 08, 2004)

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