A port of Faceball 2000
Faceball is a cancelled port for the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Even though the game was never released, a late stage prototype was released online. In the prototype 2 modes of play are available, “Normal”, which is the main 1-player game, and “Arena” which most likely would have been the 2-player mode that uses the link cable.
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Virtual Boy complete - Game #11
I have only a very passing familiarity with the "Faceball" or "MIDI Maze" franchise, as far as I can tell, it's a very historically significant FPS that was built around the concept of having 16 players. The VB doesn't have multiplayer, so this game has to be judged off of its single player offerings... the single player offerings are bad.
The stages are very big and seem to have been made with 16 player gameplay in mind, however, in single player, you are set to take down 2 to 4 enemies in a time limit, which instead makes it seem like a barren maze.
There doesn't seem to be a visible life bar, and outside of the minimap there's no real way of telling how many enemies are left. There's a box with circles in it on the top left of the HUD, but I never saw it deplete. A lot of the enemies do not actively pursue you and instead just stay stuck in a small box they refuse to escape from. Often times I struggled to enter these boxes because of the destructible wall system, looking for the right walls to destroy, and ended up being timed-out.
The 3D effects are impressive, but this is a bit of a burden towards the game - far-off walls are shaded, but destructible walls flash - because the VB only has 2 colours, it's very common for walls to look destructable from a distance.
The only varied enemy type I found was invisible, but even then the reticle still locked-on to them.
That being said, for the positives, movement is fast enough and wall-bumping was minimal and unpunished; the aforementioned 3D effects are ultimately impressive regardless of their effect on gameplay; there are good options provided for locating smilies through the radar and mini-map; and shooting smilies feels very statisfying. I did have a tiny bit of fun in the first few levels, but once the levels started getting more maze-like, my enjoyment dropped.
I have only a very passing familiarity with the "Faceball" or "MIDI Maze" franchise, as far as I can tell, it's a very historically significant FPS that was built around the concept of having 16 players. The VB doesn't have multiplayer, so this game has to be judged off of its single player offerings... the single player offerings are bad.
The stages are very big and seem to have been made with 16 player gameplay in mind, however, in single player, you are set to take down 2 to 4 enemies in a time limit, which instead makes it seem like a barren maze.
There doesn't seem to be a visible life bar, and outside of the minimap there's no real way of telling how many enemies are left. There's a box with circles in it on the top left of the HUD, but I never saw it deplete. A lot of the enemies do not actively pursue you and instead just stay stuck in a small box they refuse to escape from. Often times I struggled to enter these boxes because of the destructible wall system, looking for the right walls to destroy, and ended up being timed-out.
The 3D effects are impressive, but this is a bit of a burden towards the game - far-off walls are shaded, but destructible walls flash - because the VB only has 2 colours, it's very common for walls to look destructable from a distance.
The only varied enemy type I found was invisible, but even then the reticle still locked-on to them.
That being said, for the positives, movement is fast enough and wall-bumping was minimal and unpunished; the aforementioned 3D effects are ultimately impressive regardless of their effect on gameplay; there are good options provided for locating smilies through the radar and mini-map; and shooting smilies feels very statisfying. I did have a tiny bit of fun in the first few levels, but once the levels started getting more maze-like, my enjoyment dropped.
This is a shockingly fast and acid-drippingly smooth translation of Faceball, and unlike every other terrible iteration this version kind rocks harder than it has any right to.