I have to thank Big Yellow on YouTube for randomly mentioning this game in a video and reminding me that this game existed. Marble Blast was a game I had access to in middle school - as memory serves, it came preloaded on the school's iBooks. My father was a stringent Windows-over-Apple man and wouldn't brook no Macintoshes in his house, so Mac Gaming was this alternate world I only ever got tastes of for the longest time (kinda like what I imagine it was like growing up in a Nintendo household and having a friend with a SEGA Genesis). Most of those types of gaming memories came from my elementary school's old eMacs and their cache of MECC games - "Lemonade Stand", "Lewis and Clark Stayed Home", and "Word Munchers" come to mind - but Marble Blast was a late one of these to crop up for me. I was a good student, so I never really permitted myself to play Marble Blast as there was never a designated play time to do so in middle school - but I always wondered what it was like. It's abandonware now, so I was finally able to sate my curiosity.

Marble Blast Gold is a good game to sit and putz around with. I think I had "budget Monkey Ball" in my head going in, but it's almost closer to a modern "Marble Madness" than anything. Regardless, of the game's 100 or so levels, the first 50 are gimmes, the next 30 are decent challenges, and the last 20 are quite hard. There's a solid cadence to it as something you eventually just keep wanting to chip away at - definitely a good game to play while you have something on to listen to in the background. There's a good amount of variety with level gimmicks and a good amount of expression with it as a physics engine, as you try to match step with some of the posed challenges.

I do find the sequencing of the final 10-15 or so stages to be a little out of whack. The antepenultimate level, "Pathways", is easily the hardest in the game, probably followed by "Icarus" (fifth-to-last), "Battlements" (twelfth-to-last"), and "Scaffold" (eighteenth-to-last). It's probably good pacing to intersperse levels that will take you an hour to solve versus those that take five minutes to solve; at the same time, it does lend itself to some unevenness in the game's final stretch. I sort of think the game needed a stronger finisher than "King of the Mountain" - something cathartic like "Dive" would've slotted in better here, I think. Or at the very least, something that tested more of the game's mechanics and represented some final test, a little more than I got out of "King of the Mountain". It's not bad, though, I'm sorta making a mountain (heh) out of a molehill.

I do wish you got SOMEthing for clearing all the levels. Having to manually go to the credits page on the main menu to feel some sense of closure for my efforts... feels a bit like a throwback, I suppose, though not in the way I like. Ah, well.