the game was also very buggy, and the incident caused some consternation at Infogrames. Not the least of their concerns were that it gave away some parts of the game they were hoping to keep secret, and showed things that weren't going to be in the final version. Because it was released by an Australian magazine, it became known informally as KangaMOO. More information is available from the official announcement. Reception The game received mixed reviews. It has an aggregate GameRankings rating of 59 and a Metacritic score of 64 of a possible 100. Many reviewers cited the cumbersome interface, poor AI, and launch bugs as serious faults in the game, although it did receive some praise for its massive depth. More than a decade after the game's release, a retrospective by Rock, Paper, Shotgun describes the game as both important and a catastrophic failure. The developers are commended for attempting to innovate in the genre of 4X games, which is said to have become stale and formulaic. According to their review, "it was released far too early, given a few cursory patches, and left to die at the hands of furious fans". Master of Orion 3 was intended to be a game of macromanagement, which didn't quite work. The player would set broad plans and issue orders from the top, trusting the AI to carry them out. This is described as "a maddening exercise in battling your own empire’s broken AI for hours, only to discover that you’ve already overcome your only real opposition... you can just click 'end turn' a few hundred times and win without doing anything". Fan made patches are said to be partially successful in redeeming the game, but that only a few fringe players would truly enjoy it. GameSpot 6.7/10: "It lacks much of what made its predecessors such classics. The design relies on extensive automation to make it playable, and at its best, Master of Orion III succeeds in reducing the micromanagement that often plagues the later stages of games in this genre. But the combination of weak opponent AI, unappealing graphics, and having to second-guess the automation makes for an experience that is much less rewarding than you might hope". GameSpy 3/5: "The problem is that [the AI management] makes the game feel sterile. There simply isn't a whole lot to do. If you wanted to, you could let the game practically