I.Q Mania

In this surreal game your human avatar stands alone on a platform of blocks facing an army of grey, black, and green cubes (or qubes). As groups of cubes begin an ominous lurching roll in your direction, you must capture each cube (with the exception of the black ones) or be crushed.

You capture a single cube by lighting a square at your feet, allowing a cube to roll over it, and then activating that lit square. The activated square removes the cube from play. With a bit of planning, you can use special cubes to set off sequences of lit squares that can then capture many cubes at once.

If any cube rolls off the end of the platform, however, or you capture a black cube, the platform on which you’re standing gets a little shorter. Should you get pushed off the end of the platform, you will fall into the black abyss, and to your doom. When your game ends you are assigned a high score, appropriately called an IQ.

This entry in the Intelligent Qube series is essentially a compilation, including over 7000 levels selected from the three earlier games in the series (Intelligent Qube, IQ Final and I.Q. Remix), including 100 Attack modes and a new Survival mode. Next to regular ad-hoc multiplayer, Sony also introduced a new form of game sharing. I.Q. Mania was released at the same time as the puzzlers XI Coliseum and Bakufuu Sentai Bombermen. If you own one of these games and a friend has one as well, you can play multiplayer games for any of them simply by connecting. Each game also includes a demo for the other two games and five multiplayer minigames: Bowling, Kunoichi Densetsu, Double Smash , N.U.M. and Party x Party x Party.