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.
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.
2 Comments
@DeltaWDunn: I don't think that was possible in the original version that I played last year, but that's good to know if I ever decide to go back to Gold for some reason. I'll keep an eye on Marble it Up though, thanks for the suggestion!
DeltaWDunn
8 months ago
There's also a new series from the same team behind this game, Marble it Up!. It's pretty much the same kind of game, but I still rather like it.