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The recipe for a game is often just a piece of one classic game here, a piece of another classic game there, and mix. Sometimes the resulting concoction is better than either of the two ingredients. In the case of Luxor Deluxe, a "three-in-a-row, shoot-the-marble" game, the dish is pleasing to the palate.

Specifically, Luxor Deluxe brings back fond memories of the old Atari game Centipede with a "shooter" that moves back-and-forth horizontally on the bottom of the screen. In keeping with the game's Egyptian theme, your ammo emerges from a launcher that resembles a scarab beetle and fires upward, a different take on, say, another popular and similar game, Zuma, whose frog-like shooter whirls about in the middle of the screen and fires in a 360-degree pattern.

As with other games of its type, the goal here is to aim at long trains of colored balls in trenches that snake this way and that across the various playing fields. If you manage to land, say, a red ball next to two other red balls, the three vanish. Eliminate all the balls before they make their way choo-choo-like to the pyramid at the end, and you're on to the next level. Fail and it's one life down and two more to go.

Luxor Deluxe starts simple enough, giving gamers the illusion that they have what it takes to keep racking up the points. While it may be a snap at first, soon the challenge sets in: the number of balls grows, one row of balls rolls in front of another making it all but impossible to get a bead on the ones in the rear, and everything starts to accelerate. Should you really get into the game and manage to reach level 50 or so, that's when the going really gets tough. Suddenly there's a screen with two parallel tracks that, side by side, allow the balls to roll relentlessly toward two separate pyramids. Oh sure, it may sound do-able. However, we're here to say that, it is extremely challenging.

The mouse control is simplicity itself: left mouse click shoots a ball, right mouse click allows you to select a ball of another color. Simplifying matters even further, while you're shooting, you can also catch tumbling gems (for extra points), ankh coins (for extra lives), and power-ups (for, well, powering up). The power-ups -- exploding fireballs, lightning bolds, and wild cards that enable you to match any colors -- were helpful but a wider variety of them could have made the game more interesting.

Luxor Deluxe looks great and sounds even better with pseudo-Egyptian music and a chorus of voices that get louder and more insistent as time gets shorter and you edge closer and closer to your ultimate doom. There's nothing like being just this close to losing ... and having a chorus of Egyptian noodges tut-tutting your gameplaying prowess. All in all, Luxor Deluxe is a challenging puzzler that mummies and daddies alike will enjoy.