The premise of Cuboingo is simple enough: Colored tiles will fly at your cube from a variety of directions and your job is to rotate the cube so the colored tile lands on the correct space on the cube. Fill up the cube with the colored tiles, and you move on to the next level. Allow the colored tile to land on the wrong space and you get a strike. Just like in baseball, three strikes and you’re out.

The game is played using the keypad numerals to rotate the cube in different directions. A gamer who is accustomed to using a mouse or joystick might feel a little awkward going back to using the keyboard to play, and it took me a couple of tries to get the hand/eye coordination to match up to the motion on the screen.

The game itself runs on scripts that determine the speed and pattern of the tiles, and new scripts are available for download at the company’s Web site. There are even instructions that allow you to create your own game script and share it with other Cube-heads.

The learning curve for this game is short, which would make it seem ideal for a time-killer game — a nice break from Solitaire, perhaps. But it does get frustrating after a little while, especially when you just can’t seem to find that one open space for the tile to drop into. The handful of original scripts can get repetitive, too. I found myself replaying one or two scripts just because the others were too damn hard. And then those two scripts became too easy as I started to remember the position and layout of the cube levels. Understandably, this is a complex little puzzle game to program, but a randomizer effect on the layouts would probably ease some of that “stuck in the middle” frustration I was feeling.

I also started to get annoyed with the sound effects, which sounded sort of like what you would hear if an anime character were on crack. Not that it’s a bad sound, just weird and more than a little creepy at times. The background music was enjoyable and unobtrusive, though and the layout of the screen was appealing.

Don’t get me wrong, I really did enjoy playing the game. In fact, I’m beginning to see its merits as something more than a mere computer game for us bored geeks. It’s perfect for little geeks-in-training. Seriously. It’s like the sort of thing that we’d have to play during gifted & talented class in elementary school if we had computers back then. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that some schools have indeed picked up this game to use as a learning tool. It’s really great for working on your eye/hand coordination as well as forcing you to think in three-dimensional space. I’d make the company’s new logo something like “Senntient Games. Responsible for the 3-D visualization of baby geeks around the world.” Now how many other time-killer games can claim that?