Minimum Requirements: Windows 95 or higher Pentium 133 Mhz (200Mhz recommended) 32 MB RAM 60 MB Hard Drive space 16-bit colors, 640x480, DirectX certified video driver, 1 MB of cache video memory (800x600 recommended) 2X CD-ROM Direct Sound compatible Sound Card Publisher: Wrebbit Developer: Dyad Da Intro: The scenario: There's a storm outside. You don't care because you have your trusty computer beside you. You fire up the CPU and prep yourself for a little multi-playing online. All of a sudden your cable Internet connection goes down hard. You make the dreaded phone call to your cable company and you're told by the automated answering system that you are number 45 in the queue. "Please be patient, all calls will be answered in the order they are received." Ugh! I suppose you could play another round with the "bots", but what's that on your nightstand? The birthday present you got from your parents because they know you're "into computers." Sitting underneath your paisley socks is Puzz3D: The Orient Express from the Twenties. We all remember the jigsaw puzzles we played as kids. To tell you the truth, I haven't played with a jigsaw puzzle in about 15 years. A kind of puzzle evolution has occurred since then. Companies started coming out with 3D jigsaw puzzles. If you haven't seen these, they resemble models of houses, vehicles, or anything that someone would want to put back together. That's where Dyad and Wrebbit Interactive come in. They have taken the legendary Orient Express, cut it up into hundreds of pieces, and digitized it into the computer for you to reconstruct. Da Installation: Straight forward. If you've done one you've done them all. The instructions suggest installing QuickTime 4.0 and DirectX 7.0 even if you have these already installed. I opted out because I didn't want to upset my pro version of QuickTime, or my updated DirectX 7.1 install. Installing over existing versions might be the trick in order to get this game working correctly, but more on that later. The full install on the hard drive takes up about 40 MB of hard drive space. Da Graphics: You know how they say the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach? No way. It's through his graphics card! And unfortunately Puzz3D doesn't hit the mark. First of all, the only resolutions supported are 640x480 and 800x600. I understand they want to keep the minimum requirements down, but that's no excuse for not including higher resolutions. Secondly, the game really does feel like a 2D game with 3D aspects put in as an after-thought. This really shows through when you view the model of the train in the 3D view. You can scroll around the working area, but it's like scrolling through screenshots instead of being immersed in the environment. However, the video files in this game are of a great quality, and they are the one saving grace for the graphics end. The walk through for different parts of the train do more than give you a history lesson, they give you the feel of the Orient Express of the 1920's. You can almost smell the mahogany. Da Sound: Adequate sound. What you would expect from a non-action game. I would have liked some background music of some sort during the actual game play. European period music from the 1920's would have been ideal. Da Gameplay: OK, it's a puzzle game, which means twitchy index fingers won't cut the mustard here. You actually have to start using that gray matter upstairs. After loading up the game for the first time, I walked through the guided tutorial from the main menu. This is great if you haven't played one of these 3D puzzle games before. You learn the basics of the controls and the neat tricks, like grouping common pieces of the puzzle together. This helps you visualize the different segments of the train better. It's an easy learning curve, and after the tutorial, you're ready to play the game. Basically you have four difficulty levels to choose from which include: Easy, Average, Challenging and Super-Challenging. The first thing I did was load the Easy level. I figured I might as well start simple since I didn't want to harm my fragile ego by biting off more than I could chew. The screen is laid out like a table full of pieces everywhere. The main difference between the difficulty levels is that with Easy, your pieces are already constructed and ready to work with. But the harder you go, the more pieces you have to deal with. With Easy, you get 150 pieces that are already sorted, with no overlapping and no rotations on the pieces. With the Super-Challenging, you get all 707 pieces to play with and absolutely no help or guidance. I really don't suggest diving into the deep end unless you are really good at jigsaw puzzles. Now the top level might sound harsh, but by playing through the difficulties, starting with Easy, you will become familiar with what goes where. You also start to recognize the different areas of the train. I guess this is really where you need to be a jigsaw junkie in order to find true replay value. The game isn't all just jigsaw puzzling. After each completed level of constructing the Engine and Passenger Car, you are awarded a ticket to board the train. The access the ticket gives you depends on the difficulty you just completed. With Easy, all you get is the ticket to view the sleeping quarters on the train. Each increased level adds another area to explore. It is this part of the game where you can also choose to test your wits with some mind bending puzzles. Because of the problem described below, I didn't get a chance to test all of these out. They really did remind me of the old 7th Guest and 11th Hour games where you needed to solve different puzzles in order to continue on. Except here the solution isn't a necessity to continue. With the ticket you can also view a map of the Orient Express route, which travels through cities such as Paris, Munich and Istanbul. This is where the history lesson comes in. I definitely found it interesting because I didn't know much about the Orient Express or its route before. On the train there are observation points that allow you to take nice 360-degree gander at the sites around you. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take advantage of this feature too much, because whenever I started the tour of the train, with my version, the game crashed back out to Windows with an 'illegal operation' error. I sent a quick email to the publishers, and they replied back suggesting I try to lower the Hardware Acceleration in my Systems/Performance settings. After doing this a few times, nothing was fixed. This is really too bad. The promise of seeing more of the train is a good incentive to do the next level. At least the developers were wise enough to store all the video on the CD in plain QuickTime format, so that you can view all the videos regardless of the game crashing or not. I did have one more beef with the gameplay. This is supposed to be a jigsaw puzzle. While you're working on it, you should be able to view a completed model just like the old 2D flat puzzles, which have completed images on the box. This game sort of has that feature, but it is really limited. Instead of being able to view the completed model from any angle, all that is available are four still pictures of the train from different angles. These don't cover all parts of the train. I really do wish that if companies insist on using "3D" in the name, they should put some 3D functionality in the controls. Da Conclusion: This game will not be awarded game of the year. But you know what? Who cares. While playing this game and trying to figure out which piece went into another piece, I became engrossed in the gameplay for more than 2 hours. I was playing on the Average level. Now maybe I am giving away a glimpse of my intelligence to you folks, but I did feel a bit of nostalgia, remembering when I was five trying to put jigsaw puzzles together over at Grandma's house. As for the shortcomings, I can live without in-game music. My MP3's can fill that void. Full 3D graphics engine? OK, maybe I'm being a bit picky, but it would be nice though. However, I truly hope they fix the problems with the crashing back to Windows. If it's one thing I can't stand, it's a buggy software product. Bottom line: Is it worth buying? Yes, if you like being challenged with puzzles. Rating: 2.5 out of 5 joysticks.