A few months after I.Q Remix‘s release, the games’ developer Sugar & Rockets was folded into Sony’s internal development studios, and there wouldn’t be another Intelligent Qube for a good few years. It seemed like the series was more or less done, with nowhere to go and nobody willing to take a chance on it. Then came the PlayStation Portable.
The excitement of creating games as powerful as those on the original PlayStation for a handheld resulted in many ports, remakes and reworkings of classic PS1 titles during the PSP’s early years. It was in this context that Intelligent Qube came back one last time with I.Q Mania, which returns to the style of the PlayStation titles and supposedly includes all of the puzzles featured in the previous games.
Mania initially seems like a straightforward port of I.Q Final, but there’s quite a lot of minor differences. The Create and Tektonics modes are gone, and Survival has been reworked so that you’re only dealing with one puzzle at any time and completing puzzles doesn’t give you more rows. You can also play Survival online against another player. All the characters from Final return and are available from the start, while the framerate has been halved to 30fps.
Each stage lasts four rounds instead of three, so they take longer to play through. But unlike Final, you’re able to resume from the stage you most recently reached instead of the one you most recently beat, which is a nice change that means you don’t have to repeat stages if you’re looking to see the later ones more easily. The soundtrack uses Takayuki Hattori’s work from Final, but places the tracks in a different order and even includes a couple cues from the original.
Mania is a solid enough way of playing Intelligent Qube on the go, though there’s lots of little things that are a bit off. There aren’t footstep sounds when moving around, the camera doesn’t pan to a wide shot when speeding up the cubes, the crisis music doesn’t kick in if you’re in a tight spot, and the jingles for levels or game overs play too early or too late. It doesn’t make for something compellingly different from the earlier titles, it feels more like it’s an iffy recreation despite everything being technically fine.
A minor but interesting footnote about I.Q Mania is that it features cross-play compatibility with two other PSP updates of classic games: XI Coliseum (based on Devil Dice) and Bomberman: Bakufuu Sentai Bombermen (based on the original Bomberman). Each game contains playable demos for the other two, and you can play ad-hoc multiplayer of whichever games you and the other players had. For instance, two players could both play I.Q Mania or XI Coliseum even if they only owned one of either title.
Each game also featured minigames that are either pre-installed or could be downloaded. Mania includes mahjong and XI ColoBowl, a Devil Dice-themed bowling game, and more games could be unlocked by downloading special wallpapers. Among these were Legend of Kunoichi, Double Smash, N.U.M., and Party x Party x Party.
Mania, Coliseum and Sentai Bombermen were developed by Will, a contract developer who have worked on many projects. They’re perhaps best known for the perspective-bending puzzler echochrome, though other interesting projects of their include the multi-disc adventure game Juggernaut, the action-RPG Game Boy Color version of Daikatana, and Play Novel: Silent Hill for the Game Boy Advance.
Links:
A press release from IGN discussing the cross-play multiplayer and downloadable minigames: https://www.ign.com/articles/2006/01/18/sony-brings-puzzlers-to-psp
