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The Lowdown
Pros: Smart design, with innovative and challenging gameplay that
nonetheless is easy for anyone to pick up and learn. Hours of fun.
Cons: Easy to learn, hard beyond good measure to master! Later levels may
prove deviously difficult for some, and some aspects of design seem to
be intended to cripple your chances.
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Many of Taito’s much-milked cash cow franchises - mostly
starring a pair of dinosaurs green and blue - need no introduction. Over
the many years and many iterations since company darlings Bub and Bob
popped their first bubble, Bust-A-Move has made Taito nigh-synonymous
with “sequel maker” in the game developer dictionary. In fact, the
cuties even appear in the odd game venture outside of their smash hit
puzzle series - such as the VERY odd game we’re going to discuss today.
If it weren’t for the review title giving it away, you might suspect
Darius Twin to be today’s subject. Compared to that fishy shooter,
however, this game is wildly unpopular and just about as quirky, the
purebred product of the most advanced hardware of the day and an
inexplicable creative flash in Taito’s stagnant lineup, and a promising
springboard for a genre of games that never quite came into its own.
The recipe for this delectable dish? Take a heavy helping of Sonic the
Hedgehog’s rotating special stages. Add a dash of Marble Madness, a
pinch of pinball, mix together and chill in a big, soothing new age
fridge. What do we get? On The Ball, brought to the table for Super
Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992, where Taito loses its marbles in
a maze of devilishly designed levels that will turn your world upside
down - literally. A seemingly little-known game that goes by the name
Cameltry in Japan, On The Ball is good for a one- or alternating two-
player romp through some 99 races-against-the-clock in full Mode 7
glory. The Super Nintendo hardware gets a full workout here, as
everything revolves around the star of the show - the titular ball, blue
or red - at the player’s whim, at all times. It’s that facet of the game
that makes it terribly different from just about anything that came
before or ever since.
Should you choose to go it alone, it’s up to you to start clearing the
many aforementioned rounds, which are divided up into courses. Four
courses, varying in length and difficulty, make up each ‘plane’. A brief
tutorial course introduces the concepts you’ll need to clear the current
plane, then it’s up to you to put what you learned to use. In control of
our beady little friend as it moves through its surroundings, you have
the power to jump from walls and accelerate your fall - and that’s it.
The rest of your movement is dependent on the forces of inertia you
create by spinning the stage around the ball, and in so doing, you’ll
guide it past pinball bumpers, crash it through breakable bricks, and
negotiate the twisting tunnels and crazy conveyors towards the goal,
which you must reach before your time runs out. In the process, you can
keep your ball in play longer by avoiding the time-sapping,
yellow-and-red ‘X’ boxes and hitting bonus blocks that add a precious
few seconds to your time or give you points. Depending how you did in
the previous stage, you start with a replenished clock in the next that
could very well make the difference between a happy ball or a
disintegrated pile of glass.
Once you clear all the courses in a plane, you’re awarded a password
that will allow you to skip ahead past the last plane you cleared next
time you start up the game. However, if you start with a friend, while
the first plane may be your oyster - you can choose to start competing
for the best times anywhere - you’ll most likely need to work solo if
you want to move past the initial four courses. A ball only has three
continues to its name - barring the second chances and extra time you
can win against Vegas-shaming odds - and sharing them between two
players leads to some expectedly short runs. One benefit of playing with
a friend is that the quicker ball-roller gets an automatic bonus for the
next stage, but that also means someone might be left behind to watch a
long while once they drop out of the game for good (ie, when the credits
run out).
As with many a pure Mode 7 game, On The Ball couldn’t have done without
the system’s built-in scaling and rotation, at least not with this level
of pomp and flair. As said before, it’s an exceedingly new
age-influenced game, which the backgrounds reflect in their
overwhelmingly weird renditions of everything from Easter Island heads
to aquatic fauna to boss scenes from Darius Twin. While the sprites and
environments themselves are quite average, at times even paltry, in
comparison to a game like Mario Kart both in color and detail, every
last pixel is, as in that game, Mode 7-manipulated. Everything smoothly
and speedily rotates about with dizzying precision - so if you’re one of
those weak-stomached, vertiginous types with a penchant for avoiding the
teacup rides at the local fair, I would advise against playing this baby
for extended periods. With its processing resources freed as much as
possible by the hardware effect-heavy game, the Super Nintendo goes
pretty darn fast at times, especially if you’re pinballing between
bumpers or rocketing down a straightaway. Throw into the mix varying
gravity, reversed direction and differing ranges of rotation in some
stages, and On The Ball proves a great challenge.
Even for those of us who are inured to virtual vertigo, unrefined
movements of the ball’s world with the standard controller are going to
produce a twitchy, headache-inducing effect, so for a subtler touch,
Taito was kind enough to make this one of the few Mouse-compatible
titles for SNES. You’ll be very thankful they did, as it also makes the
game easier to control. Instead of using the directional pad or L and R
buttons for rotating, moving the mouse left and right quickly becomes a
much more natural-feeling alternative to the same end. The buttons are
put to use for the rest (jumping and faster falling).
Sound-wise, it must be noted that On The Ball abuses the voice-sampling
powers of 16-bit hardware like few others. The result is a
hilarity-inducing soundtrack that, at its best, is full of languid,
airy, new age synth, and, at worst, hip-hopish, poorly-synced vocals and
giggling girl sound effects that make you wonder at times if perhaps
Taito’s sound studio simply gave up. Perhaps that’s a little
exaggerated, as certain songs stand head and shoulders above the rest
and really flesh out the intended ‘aura’ of the game, but when one track
loops with a very audible seam after a whole five generic-sounding
seconds, one has to take note and laugh.
Overall
So what is the final verdict on this, a true relic of once-cutting
edge technology? It’s still a fine-looking 2-D game from that era of
pixelated goodness, and more importantly, tons of fun when you get a
friend in on it compared to many more traditional games. It lacks the
sheer speed and variety of Sonic, the mind-boggling difficulty of Marble
Madness, and the timelessness of pinball, but by borrowing from all of
these, it’s got wide-ranging appeal to anyone with a working mouse-hand
and the slightest love of amazingly-built, interactive mazes.
- Katie Montminy
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