The Super Amazing Blue Ball Game: Truest Title Ever!

[Gizmog]

TheSuperAmazingBlueBallGame is another great piece of plotscripting that came out of the Simplest Game Contest. One of the rules of that contest was a minimum of inputs, which is why you select options with left and right rather than enter. Until I remembered the contest, that really bugged me. One of the dangers of revisiting contests!

There's a few modes of play, All-Out mode which combines all the hazards, wall mode where you just dodge walls, Starbursts mode where you dodge starbursts and Freeze Mode where, humorously, the game just freezes. Mysteriously, there's also a Box mode that popped up when I went back to double-check the possible options. In that mode, the ball is in a box that shrinks, and then starts to move around, forcing you to stay inside. Who knows what other secrets the game might have!

You don't have direct control of the ball, which is what makes the game both frustrating and fun. Instead, pushing left, right, up or down changes the force of gravity to pull from that direction, indirectly affecting your ball. The physics involved feel really cool, it seems like it'd be a good game to play with a joystick. The longer you survive, the more points you get! My favorite hazard are the starbursts, which start as a shrinking circle and then explode several circles that shoot out into a bigger circle. We need more OHR games with round shapes, squares are getting out of style.

The music is really cool and has a techno-arcadey vibe to it. Very cool game all around, especially if there's any more secrets hiding inside of it. I get a giggle that the "save your score" button just takes a screenshot and I love it when tech-y games like this have a cool menu rather than just dumping you into it. More than worth a try, though the controls are a bit unforgiving. I don't think I've ever had a high score over 100. Looks and feels so cool though. An absolute masterpiece, especially considering its simple guidelines.