I *think* the ball patterns give a little more clarity, althought the colors are still close. Don't think it's that big a deal though. At level 4/1, the speed ramped up quite dramatically and I was able to get past a couple of levels so, the color thing might not be a big issue.

As for luxor being better, I'm not so sure. There isn't any of the fru fru in the background of Atlantis. No heiroglyphs or pretty pictures, but the backgrounds (and everything else for that matter) are rendered beautifully and I think this might be the prettier of the two. The purchased powerup concept is an interesting one, the splitting of Luxor's speed shot into an actual speed shot and an accuracy shot is good, and I *love* the powerup that kills all the chains on the board. The music is well done and subtle enough not to become irritating. I still miss the rightclick for switching balls, just so I can kick back and only need one hand for my turbomouse. Both are priced the same so there's no advantage there. The levels are different from Luxor. I can't seem to get to the second stage in an hour, so I can't comment on stage bosses or level repetition in later stages. Luxor seemed to start repeating quite quickly, although again, I can't say Atlantis doesn't do the same.

Is the level 4 insanity speedup a demo thing? If not, it needs to be toned down quite a bit as I can easily see it putting some people off. (It *really* was quite insane.)

I seem to have no problems running Atlantis on my 17" book with a gig of ram and a fresh 10.4.2 install (just put a new hard drive in this week).

Granted, yes this is the same game as Luxor excepting the different graphics, levels and powerup variations. That said however, I think I would recommend this game over Luxor if you had to choose just one. I've played luxor a ton, up to, but not finishing the last boss (omg the last boss). Two things really bugged me about Luxor: it gives you colors you need when the line is getting towards the end, but that screwed you on some boards where overlapping wouldn't allow you to use them and sometimes when shooting vertically at a line, the shot would jump over the first ball to land behind it, causing more trouble. I haven't seen either of these problems with Atlantis in my limited viewing.