System Requirememnts: Windows 95/98 Pentium 100 (P 200 recommended) 16 Meg RAM (24 meg recommended) Microsoft Compatible Mouse 45 MB Hard Drive Space (21 MB for Files, 24 MB for virtual memory) Video and Display 640X 480, 16 bit color, Direct X (1 meg Video cache recommended) 2X CD ROM or faster Windows 95 virtual memory should be on the Sound Card Direct Sound compatible From the moment I was handed Wrebbit's Puzz 3d CD - Bavarian Castle I was curious as to how well a product like this would covert to software. At times I was amazed at how well thought out this software was. However I am forced to give it the failing grade due to a few tragic errors. I do feel guilty as this program could of received close to an A grade if it had not been for its two main faults. The first fault I could not help but notice right away and almost doomed this review to a one paragraph scathing review, however I was able to overcome this error. This program was designed for 640x480 screen resolution. Now I have a good video card and a 17" monitor so I run in 1280x1024. While the program ran nothing scaled up for my desktop leaving a huge expanse of black empty space. Later on exploring the program thinking back to this made me very sad as I found myself at a shortage of room to work. The only way I could make this game playable was to lower my windows desktop resolution to 640x480 bringing the game full screen. However pictures are worth a thousand words, and I want to get across how much this fault angered me.. It took me a while to get used to the new screen size, but once I did the game was fully functional and I was challenged enough that I did seriously want to beat the game. For time's sake ( and my sanity ) I played it on the easiest skill level. There are four different skill levels for the rookies and up to the truly brave. I would suggest everyone start at the lowest level to get the hang of the way the program works. I took the quick tutorial, which had me building a small little country house out of about 25 pieces. At times I was amazed at just how brilliantly a 3d Puzzle was represented by this game. The game had 3 zoom levels, and at the maximum zoom you could tell just how beautifully done the pieces were, however with this zoom level and the tiny desktop it was all but useless. I found myself in the second zoom level, at this level I was usually able to make out the puzzle joins and have a decent amount of area to work with. I quickly organized all the like pieces into "trays" a great way to keep track of your pieces, or in my case to hide something you will look for later! Thinking back the tray system was great, just my inexperience with puzzles at fault. Once I had all the pieces gathered I started placing them together. They easily snapped together if you had the right pieces and rarely did I find myself repeating and action to get the pieces to snap. When you had completed a "section" of the puzzle a small noise would chime allowing you to add that section to your full sized model. This was done by dragging and dropping the completed portion into the "golden tray", hitting the space bar, and then dragging and dropping the portion onto the 3d layout. This was made very easy on the rookie level, as it would tell you where to place the pieces. One fault of the golden tray was if you tried to drop an incomplete section on it, it would spit out a warning message and then if the piece was small enough proceed to hide that piece under the golden tray. The first little while of building the castle I was almost overwhelmed by the game, sure that I would be unable to complete even the simplest level, but slowly but surely, the pieces came together. During the first 30 minutes I got the hang of assembling pieces and moving around the desktop. This is where I encountered the second of this game's major faults. In the 2nd zoom level you could scroll left, right and up by placing the mouse cursor next to the edge of the screen and a little arrow would appear, click and the screen would scroll. For the life of me I could not find out how to get the view to scroll downwards. This caused me have to back out to the maximum zoom and then zoom back in again. However, it would always zoom to the middle of the desktop leaving pieces hidden at the bottom! This was very close to putting the nail in the coffin for this program, however I shortly realized that if I grabbed a piece of the puzzle I was able to scroll in all four directions. It was a work around for a flaw that really should have been picked up in testing. Just over 2 hours after my first serious attempt at building a castle, I finally figured out why the last two pieces would not click together and Castle Neuschwanstein of the Mad King Ludwig was complete. There were a few hitches in the assembly of the castle beyond what I went into above, however these were quickly fixed by reading the instructions. I must say that most of this time was more of me flailing wildly with the pieces trying to connect them together than skillfully finding the correct pieces, however I did have fun. With the bronze key that I was given for completing the puzzle on rookie level I was allowed to partially explore a beautifully rendered version of the castle searching for parts of a sword as part of another game. If I had the time I would gladly go back and attempt to complete the game on its hardest setting in order to get the last key that unlocked the full castle. I figure that on the hardest setting it would be a 20-30 endeavor to complete. This rendered portion of eye candy was awesome and made the entire struggle to get to this point worthwhile. I was always wishing that it could have been higher resolution and using my 3d card for live rendering rather than just 2d playback. Throughout the assembly process and the exploration of the castle I was treated to clips of Wagner's music which really helped to add to the atmosphere. However the video clips managed to do the exact opposite, I could not but be bothered by the California accents and slang alongside the cheesy lines that was spread thick in this portion of the game. Due to the errors in this program I am forced to give it a joystick down. I do not do this without some guilt and trepidation as it has its strong points and is as beautiful as a 640x480 program can be. If given the chance I must say I would gladly test out the other two programs in this series Notre Damme and Victorian Mansion. There is also a fourth game in this series in development, which gives me hope for something bigger and brighter in the future! I do feel as Neuschanwstein is one of my absolute favorite buildings in the world and it deserves more than the screen size it was given. As a small follow-up to this review. I sent off some email to Wrebbit, (the publishers) about the problems I had with their product. Within one business day I had a reply back answering the majority of my questions. In a world full of poor customer support Wrebbit came out ahead of the majority of the world. I was given, well thought out, full replies to my questions instead of the one-sentence answers that I am used to from many other companies. The one question I failed to get a great response to was the one about me being unable to find the "scroll down" arrow. However I did feel as though there was a real person on the other end of that email, and that he actually wanted to help me. Puzz-3D Neuschwanstein Bavarian Castle was reviewed by gameboyz reader: Somberfire Test Machine P2 300 Windows 98 TNT Video Card - Desktop 1280x1024 with millions of colors 9 GIGs Hard Drive