I never played Marble Blast Ultra so I have no real nostalgia for this game's pedigree (I may have played a teeny bit of the OG Marble Blast on a school computer but the memory is hazy). I picked this up after watching a Patricia Taxxon video where she endorses it and she's correct that it's great; I feel like I have a lot to say but it's all just parroting points in her video. The comparison to a fantasy of a good 3D Sonic game is particularly apt. You even collect gems... can emeralds be purple?

I "beat" this, in that I finished the "last" level, but this is the sort of game where getting to the end is not very challenging and does not feel like the point of the experience. Getting anything less than gold in a level feels like a hollow victory; getting diamond feels tremendous.