Mashakosha's Blog

The Ball: Review

mashakosha — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:03:51 +0000

You find yourself underground in vast, dark ruins. Carvings and various inscriptions in an ancient language mark the walls. At your feet lies an item, lost for centuries and, once in your hands, allows you to control an item known only as The Ball. Though you haven’t done this before, it all feels strangely familiar. After about an hour, it clicks. “This is kind of like Portal.”

That’s the difficulty, you see. It is so very hard to say anything about The Ball without making some sort of reference to the popular first person puzzler. It is by no means an exact copy, and it’s obvious that Portal opened the door for first person puzzling and likely inspired The Ball as well. However, that familiarity is something that, once realised, is difficult to shake and that makes judging it on its own merits somewhat harder.

As already mentioned, The Ball takes place underground in massive, ancient caverns. These areas are beautiful to say the least, even if the copious amounts of brown everywhere is more than a little disappointing. But at least here it is actually necessary and it doesn’t feel completely out of place. Inexplicably lit torches line the walls, casting shadows a little creepily at times and once or twice it even has you wondering if that one shadow wasn’t a just a shadow at all. This is one of the things about The Ball that gets you the first time you play it.

The nature of the game is a strange one. You spend the first couple of levels rolling your Ball around merrily, solving some simple puzzles and occasionally smashing a cute little monkey to bloody pieces. But at the end of each level, it tells you how many monkeys and monsters you killed- hang on, monsters? Well I suppose each game needs its antagonists. So you continue, firing your Ball around, pulling it out of the water and using it as a counterweight in another seesaw puzzle. It’s quite a lot of fun.

Then you come across the monsters. It changes from a relatively slow-paced game into a frenetic ancient Aztec zombie-killing slaughterhouse. You shoot the ball off at a group of them only to realise that there’s another one above you, shooting fireballs at you and taking a significant amount of your health away with each hit. Your only protection in your precious Ball, but now it’s over the other side of the room, with an army of monsters between it and you. So you use your doohickey to pull it back towards you, but it travels far too slowly and before you can really do anything about it, you’re either killed by a mob of monsters, or by the almost impossible-to-avoid fireballs.

Thankfully, the checkpoints are well placed, so you’re never really too far from where you were before. This is helpful, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Ball itself is an extremely difficult-to-use weapon, and cumbersome at that. Often, you’ll find yourself stuck cowering behind the metal sphere, staring at the zombies crammed against the other side, leaving you the difficult choice of releasing the ball to power up your hammer weapon or making a break for the other side of the room and pray that there aren’t any more fireball monsters.

Assuming you manage to survive that encounter, the action will likely be broken up by a puzzle. Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious what you have to do, other times you’ll just be sat there wondering what the blazes you’re doing for far too long and yet other times you’ll think to yourself, “Why on earth did my character come down this far?”

See, that’s the other problem I have with The Ball. Your character is supposed to be a simple archaeologist and I’m sure you’re jumping out of your seats right now to tell me something like “Indiana Jones was an archaeologist too!” and yeah, I suppose so, but he had a gun, a whip and actually had a clue about what he was doing. As far as we know about our guy, he fell down a hole and the man up top said that they’d get him out soon. Okay, so he also told our man to explore a bit too, but curiosity will only make a man go so far. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have even touched the device he picks up at the start. Who knows what sort of trap it could have set off? I digress.

In the end, I’m not entirely sure what to think about The Ball. It’s a good, fun game and quite beautiful at times, but the combat feels so clunky that I’m wary of going back to it when I see it in my pile of games. I’m new at doing reviews, so I wont give it a score and instead leave it up to you to decide whether it’s worth buying or not. My personal opinion and advice to you though; wait for it to go on sale again.

Can anyone hear me? I need some help!

mashakosha — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:27:19 +0000

So. Half term again. You know what that means? I get me another challenge.

It’s another spur of the moment thing that i thought up only minutes ago when I got up. I should pick a game and dedicate myself to completing it. Problem is, I have so many games that need completing that I can’t pick. I’m going to leave that to you lot. Here is a list of all the games I own that require completion.

Please don't pick ay of the C&C games!

Now, i know there aren’t that many games there really. That’s because I’m just realising how many of the games I have are multiplayer (or multiplayer enough that they can’t be ‘completed’ as such)

Anyway, posts here (if you have a WP account) or in the forum are appreciated on your thoughts.

I hear singing…

mashakosha — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:40:55 +0000

It’s all over. I’ve finished it. I know I could have gone on longer, but I forced myself to go to sleep. Real-life intruded on my private activities and ended the experiment. I wish i could have done more and kept going but it had to end. It really is a shame to finish without getting any real, conclusive results, so expect a new attempt sometime in December.

I might as well use this opportunity to tout the j-server podcast. Gamers ranting, as regular grey_painter calls it.

Nobody’s reading this anyway

mashakosha — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:07:09 +0000

I said I’d update at 6pm. Sadly, I have nothing to update on! Trying to help someone get Universe at War working, though my copy works fine. Um…’s about it really

Phase 2

mashakosha — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:17:31 +0000

At roughly 0900, I started up Team Fortress 2 to commence phase 2. Now, it has to be noted that I did have a slight warm-up period where we attempted to fill the PC Gamer server, but that just devolved into melee fighting until we had about 3-a-side. After that, i serioused the fuck up, got my game face on and all that jazz. At the start of a new map, I picked a random team and class, getting a red medic. To be honest, i should have just stuck with medic, but I realised it wouldn’t be a fair comparison to the damage-dealing heavy, so I changed to demoman (hence the large amount of destructions) and then pyro for the final push on the point. While I still recorded the results of that map, I’m not sure if I want to consider them official. Please leave comments or message me in chat on what you think.

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I did, however, get some interesting scores on Audiosurf.

Same order as the previous batch, first up is the God Hand Credits.

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Sadly, not beaten. At this point I was inclined to not even bother with the rest, thinking that they’d all definately be worse. Nevertheless, I kept on. Ruby next.

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Somehow managed to double my original score. Whatever, I thought, it’s probably an exception.

Somehow, i always forget to do a screen for midnight runner. Anyway, this shows how much I improved on it since last night.

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Up by about 19k. Not bad.

Kitten is Angry and by The Emperor was she angry.

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Score slipped by around 1000 points. It looks like Wonderwall would have to tip the scales one wya or the other.

The result surprised me.

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Apparently, I improved on that one as well.

Well, that’s all I had a proper plan to do, but I’m going to drag this out as long as I can. See you around 6pm when I’ll update next!

Phase one complete

mashakosha — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:36:08 +0000

So, phase one was initiated at around 1650hrs today, when I went onto a random public TF2 server, picked a random class and let rip with all I had. I was given Heavy to play as, though it didn;t help that on my entire team, no matter how much I begged, I couldn’t get a half decent medic.

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Came through with a kill for every death with a few assists. Not brilliant, but sufficient. I’m not much of a heavy player, hence my recent achievment of the sandvich.

Then at around 12am, I began my Audiosurfing. The first song was the God Hand credits song. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vAga2AjfZlg The song can be heard here.

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Next up was Ruby by Kaiser Chiefs

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Then I played Midnight Runner by Pendulum. Forgot to get a screen, but the score was around 120k (whereas top scores were in the region of 150k)

EDIT: Got a screen of the score.

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Lemon demon – Kitten is angry was next.

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And finally, Wonderwall by Oasis

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So those are my 5 audiosurf songs and the scores I have to aim for.

Graham Mash is Graham

mashakosha — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:47:27 +0000

If you weren’t in chat when I announced it, I decided this morning that I’d do the apparently failed PCG experiment to see how, if at all, sleep deprivation affects gaming. I’ll be playing TF2 and Audiosurf for definate with possible CS:S, DoD:S, TMUF. You’re welcome to join me if you see me in any of those games dring either period of play time.

I’ll be playing TF2 momentarily and taking pictures of the scoreboard at the end of every full round to show my kill/death/assist ratios. I’ll also be playing through a sequence of 5 Audiosurf songs later tonight, which I will repeat at some point tomorrow. The second round of TF2 will take place at around 12pm tomorrow, again with screenshots taken

The Rules!

I am not to sleep. I’m allowed away from the computer, but I’ll always be present in the chat.

I will be allowed to stay awake by ANY means necesarry.

Audiosurf songs will be chosen by me or members of the PCG chat room. The scores and each song will be screen captured and posted here.

Should I fall asleep at any time, the experiment will be deemed a failure.

Wish me luck.