“We now know that your Stargate is a doorway”
- Release Date: July 2012
- Set: Stargate Movie
- Developer: Grey Team, Probe Software
- Publisher: Acclaim
- Writers: N/A
The original Stargate film had two completely different video game adaptations, one for home consoles and one for handheld systems, the Game Boy and Game Gear. The two handheld versions are the same game, but with the Game Gear having colour, so I opted for that version, as it just looks nicer.
This is a puzzle game that uses the concept of Stargate extremely lightly. In this game, there are multiple Stargates with Ra trying to connect to Earth and Daniel doing this puzzle to block his access. Once you’ve locked one out, you battle for the next one. It’s really stretching the concept to try and make it fit a puzzle game.
The puzzle involves moving tiles clockwise or anticlockwise around a circular grid, which goes about 7 tiles deep. Each tile has two coordinate symbols on it, and you can flip the tile with the B button. There are two ways to make tiles vanish: the first is stacking three matching symbols on top of each other, with a bonus once you’ve scored one or each symbol in the gate address at the top of the screen. The second is to have all the top tiles match the gate address (in order) to clear all tiles. Doing this (or getting the bonus from matching symbols) will then generate a new gate address for the next bonus.
There are a couple of special tiles. Blank tiles will copy the symbol below it and bomb tiles have two sides to them. One will destroy all the tiles under it while the other side will destroy all tiles matching the symbol of the one on top of it. A handy way to keep the play area from filling while you wait for the specific symbol you need.
There’s a basic high score mode and a battle mode. In battle mode, you’re fighting against an opponent. As you can’t see your opponent’s actions, this just means you get some random tiles added to your grid and you carry on until your opponent fails. You can also play this against another person, but it just feels detached.
To be fair, for a Stargate themed puzzle game (especially with just the film to go on), this definitely feels Stargate themed. It may not make sense with anything Stargate, but as a puzzle game it’s alright and you can see where they were going with it.
