Iridion 3D

Iridion 3D is a forward-scrolling rail shooter, similar to the Star Fox series. Only the Game Boy Advance's directional pad, A, and Start buttons are used during gameplay. The ship remains locked at a set speed and cannot accelerate or brake.

The player encounters more than fifteen types of enemy, not including level bosses. Some are easy to destroy; others, including fire creatures found on the Iridion home world, are indestructible and must be avoided. Other enemies prevent the player from dodging enemy fire by laying mines to block paths. Passive objects, such as garbage or asteroids, can damage or destroy the player's craft.

In the opening cinematic of Iridion 3D Earth is attacked without warning by the Iridion, who take over much of the surface and lay mines in orbit and bombs in the Pacific Ocean. The player is the pilot of an experimental SHN fighter, the last hope for defending Earth from the Iridion. The player pilots his ship alone against hordes of Iridion fighters and natural obstacles. The early stages begin on Earth, with the player fighting through an Iridion garbage tunnel. The player proceeds to the Pacific Ocean and destroys much of the Iridion invasion fleet on Earth before heading into the stratosphere to destroy the orbital blockade around Earth and subsequently annihilating the Iridion boss at the Moon.

With the invasion fleet in ruins, the player heads into the far reaches of space. After destroying an Iridion mining colony within an asteroid belt, the player proceeds into the Iridion home system. Eventually the player fights the Iridion on their home world, destroying the Iridion "mainframe" and ending the alien threat forever.

Manfred Linzner began developing a shoot-em-up video game in 1996 on his Amiga computer, but abandoned the project after producing a single level and some related music. Linzner later co-founded Shin'en Multimedia in 1999, and Iridion began development as a shooter for the Game Boy Color. On January 10, 2001, Shin'en announced they would stop making games for the Color, instead working on games exclusively for the upcoming Game Boy Advance. Iridion's executive producer was Dan Kitchen, a former programmer for Atari.

Although advertised as a 3D game, Iridion 3D uses solely 2D graphics for texture scrolling and sprites which depict explosions and enemies. The developers created the illusion of 3D by looping background textures—a graphically intensive technique for the Game Boy Advance. Graphical objects shrink or enlarge to depict position relative to the player. Level environments feature changes such as progression from day to night.

Iridion 3D received mixed reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. The graphics were often praised; reviews from The Washington Post, Popular Science, and GameSpy considered Iridion 3D a standout game for the Game Boy Advance and a showcase for the system's graphic performance. A year after its release, Extended Play's Miguel Concepcion argued that Iridion remained the best-looking game for the system. Miguel Lopez of GameSpot wrote that "while it's ultimately all smoke and mirrors, Iridion's world is richly detailed, has remarkable depth, and is unbelievably fluid.

It's often hard to tell if the game's backgrounds are composed of streaming full motion video or just some really fancy math-powered 2D bitmaps." Less positively, Aaron Curtiss of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the faux-3D visuals of Iridion were a letdown compared to true 3D games like F-Zero: Maximum Velocity.