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.

L2AGO #9

I played a bit of Marble Blast Gold as a kid and found it enjoyable enough, so I decided to give this another go many years later. I had a pretty good time with the first half of the game, just navigating the small levels with various gizmos and gadgets. That said, the latter half of the game really started to tire me out.

During many of the later Advanced levels, the game starts to rely more heavily on these larger obstacle filled levels with a ton of precision platforming. I feel like this doesn't work too well for three reasons:

1. You can't jump unless you're touching the ground, and all collisions in Marble Blast Gold are elastic. So, there's actually a pretty tight window to get an immediate jump upon landing the first time and if you mistime this, you'll bounce a bit up and down instead and might end up falling off a platform.

2. The marble is constantly spinning, and the spin direction and speed determines how the marble will bounce off surfaces. So when precision platforming, you constantly need to alter the spin of your marble in mid air after a jump to make sure your resulting landing spin doesn't cause you to spin bounce off the platform due to too much momentum.

3. The camera is not amazing: your usual mouse cam cannot pan up or down, only side to side, and the camera often gets caught on the edge of platforms or near walls/surfaces that are too close to the camera. You can at least pan the camera up and down with the free cam while stationary fairly easily, but it's a bit trickier to free cam up and down while platforming or moving. In addition, the backdrop/background of all of the platforming elements does not move or rotate, so there's this uncomfortable sense of vertigo every time you get launched or fall; you have to make sure your camera is focused on the platforming elements to get an idea of how far you are traveling vertically.

A good example of where things went noticeably wrong is the advanced level Scaffold; you have to hop in succession across platforms and trapdoors while changing directions at the end and maintaining momentum as to not fall through the trapdoors, but you also can't go too fast or too far in one direction otherwise you'll spin bounce into the abyss. I had to rebind the jump button to my left click for this instance because the space bar wasn't getting me the frame tight timing I needed; even so, I felt like I was fighting against the physics of the game's engine the entire time, and my hands would start hurting from having to constantly adjust on the fly after an hour of play or so.

It's still a title I really respect, but those last few levels felt like real slogs and I can't really recommend anyone else go through that; many of them just feel like precarious trips where one misstep leads to another restart of a very careful two to three minute grind of a precision platformer that really did not feel smooth enough to be a precision platformer. It definitely has cool level elements and I'm never going to say no to a 3D marble platformer really, but I'm afraid as nostalgic as it is, that might be the end of my Marble Blast Gold career.

The problems with Marble Blast as a game aren't very hard to diagnose, especially if you're like me and played it after Marble It Up.

The difficulty curve jitters wildly from "could do with one finger with my eyes closed" to "frustrating far past a point I'd deem fun". The powerups are kind of janky, most obviously so the gravity modifier. Levels seem cobbled together, blocky elements often either overlapping and clipping into one another, or with plenty of small but visible gaps. Speaking of which, barely any of the levels are really all that conducive for the best part of this game in the first place, which is being able to go fast. Nowhere is this more apparent than what I'd dub as the "gem arena" levels, where you just navigate a bunch of paths aimlessly until you've picked up all the gems, some of which might be the same color as the level itself, basically camouflaging them, which makes for a particularly annoying experience.

That being said, though, Marble Blast is still decently fun. Most of these issues you can ignore (at least up until some of the harder advanced levels) and if you pretend this game is just the beginner, intermediate, and, like, the first half of the advanced levels, it's pretty good!

Unfortunately, difficulty in this game (in the later levels) is mostly done just by stringing together a ton of decently easy challenges in a row with no checkpoints, which doesn't really feel all that accomplishing in the end, and if you make one small mistake later on it's kind of a pain in the ass to redo everything in the level up to that point. Like, the level design up to that point already wasn't great, but after about 10 levels of dealing with that kind of thing I threw in the towel only 15 or so levels from the end. I might go back, but probably not.