#44: SmartBall

Happy Ball!

I'd never heard of SmartBall before today. The word smart at the front makes me thing that maybe this will be a neat puzzle game of some kind. Unfortunately that turned out not to be true. SmartBall would actually seem to be an interesting but confusing platformer.

Wall walk!

I take on the role of Jerry, a cute little ball of goo. He can run, and jump, and contort his body. His down to squash things you're standing on. Hit up to turn into a spike of sorts to impale things above you. If you hold the run button down you can climb up walls, and you can run along ceilings. There are little pipes you can crawl down. There are balls you cal pick up which end up floating inside you as if you were a gelatinous cube. Turns out if you hit the L button you can shoot those balls out. I found this out after failing to find a way to hurt the first boss. The boss would periodically throw out more balls, so I figured there had to be a way to use them. I hit all the buttons again, and L did the trick.

CAW!

I did a bit of reading afterwards and it turns out there's this big story about how I'm a prince that got turned into a jelly bean thing by someone who was jealous of the princess. This was all in the Japanese version, but Sony cut it all out for the NA release. I guess they figured we couldn't handle a bit of plot to go with our weird platformer. It would also seem that there's some sort of issue with the words Jerry and Jelly. I don't know if it was an intentional play on the Japanese accent or just a brutal mistranslation.

It would also seem a sequel was pretty much completely developed but by that point Sony and Nintendo hated each other so Sony didn't release it. Instead they went and made the PlayStation.

At any rate, the game only used 3 buttons, which makes me a little sad, and it chose to use L instead of a face button for shoot, which made me more sad. The complete removal of any sort of story frustrates me. The character is cute, and the music was enjoyable, but the game seemed to be built around the whole idea of sticking to walls and ceilings and the implementation was a little wonky. In particular, jumping off of them was awkward.

On the plus side, when I went game over it let me start again on the current stage and there didn't seem to be a finite number of continues. That makes me suspect if I'd played this game as a kid I would have played it through to completion.

Rating: B