Balls

$6 was worth the nostalgia for me. The last time I played this game over ten years ago, it didn't seem like anyone was selling licensed copies of it. Lots of games tried to imitate this game but couldn't replicate its charm.

The puzzle layouts came back to me immediately when I started playing, and I was excited to start speed running / high scoring levels. At first, playing on my friend's steam deck, I thought I had lost all of my past skill, when in reality, I was trying to use a joystick to control a ball that only accepted perpendicular direction inputs. Custom controls on the steam deck made it a little easier, but it was still a struggle.

I had seen enough potential to want to relive the game on my own PC, and upon playing it with keyboard controls, I fell back in love with the sounds of the game and my smooth control of the ball. It took me just over three hours of gameplay (lots of retries) to finish all 12 levels with high scores atop the default leaderboard.

However, I was rather disappointed that the 13th level (iirc "Twilight Zone" / "速度" ) was absent from this re-release. The high-difficulty 13th level was an excellent challenge, and it had been present in every version of the game that I had played until this one. A quick search revealed that level 13 was a patch by the original devs for the original release. A deeper search revealed that players on steam who wished to play on other maps need to download mods (which I'm not ashamed to admit I tried and failed to do).

I would imagine this release has made the new publisher enough money to pay a small dev team to make some tiny adjustments to make this game more palatable for the modern day. No fancy graphic shaders or sound design overhaul; I won't even ask for widescreen resolution, just these few things:
- level 13
- in-menu or steam launch option for windowed mode (rather than the jarring full-screen launch that at first tries to stretch a 4:3 picture to fit 16:9)
- steam achievements (might be a stretch but I can hope)