Ballance Impressions

See, I got a halfway decent video card for my new(ish) computer so I've been trying out some actual 3d PC gaming as of late. And of course, since I'm a cheap bastard the only games I'm playing are under 5 bucks each. The latest was found at a Dollar Tree:

Ballance

It's basically a puzzle-heavy cross between Monkey Ball and Marble Madness. Some of the puzzles are amazingly devious from looking at some vids of the later levels. Which I probably shouldn't have done since now that I've seen how crazy hard it gets, there's no way I am going devote the amount of time required to get good enough to get even halfway though this game. I gotta respect the brilliant level design though. Here's a clip of a nicely paced run through an level that was available only online from the developer's website. Keep in mind that one of the major gameplay elements is transforming your ball into paper(which looks like wadded up newsprint!), wood, or stone which affects the speed and weight.

If you found that interesting, check out this speed run of the same level.

The horrors of inpependent gaming.

Played a bit of Wik and the Fable of Souls from the PC version I got at Half Price Books for three bucks. Wik was interesting, but I'm not sure I'll play it again anytime soon, it was a little too Lemmings-ish for me. The disc had a bunch of other independent game demos so I tried the claymation art shooter Platypus which I had seen on shelves for the PSP. It wasn't a great shooter that I could tell, but it was terribly fun to play and has amazing Commodore 64-inspired music(EDIT - turns out the music is composed entirely of C64 game remixes).

Then I popped onto the website and read the incredibly depressing story of how one guy made essentially made(everything but the engine) the whole thing by himself, only got paid 2,000 bucks to do so, had his house burn down during the process, and then lost the ability to sell it on his website. Then when the PSP version came out, he saw that his name wasn't mentioned at all in the credits.

Whee.

EDIT: I was able to read that messageboard thread more and there's an interesting post from the lead programmer for the PSP version.