Top Five Ball-Rolling Games

Let's get the ball rolling (har-har) on a new top five list for SuperPhillip Central. The ball-rolling game generally consists of guiding some form a ball to a goal. There have been many iterations of this type of game, so it's been a bit of a trial to formulate a list of the five best. However, a list has been made!

5) Mercury series

Archer Maclean is a British programmer with an illustrious history of games under his belt, such as the Atari's International Karate, as well as various pool and snooker games. His Mercury series takes the ball-rolling game into a form, literally, as the gelatinous mercury ball that players in the game controlled could split in half, transform into new shapes, alter its color, and morph. The Mercury series has appeared on the PlayStation Portable, where it debuted, the PlayStation 2, and Nintendo's Wii, where the Wii Remote's motion control functionality was put to great use, having players tilt it to move the blob of mercury around.

4) Marble Madness 

One of the originators of the ball-rolling genre, Marble Madness is as classic of a title as you can get. Although there weren't a wide array of levels (approximately six, if I recall correctly), the challenge was guiding your marble around an isometric world, avoiding hazards, trying not to fall from a great height, which would shatter the marble into pieces, and rolling through the finish line before time runs out. Perhaps it's a bit blasphemous that Marble Madness is only number four on this list, but I argue that the genre only got better as time marched (or should I say, rolled?) on.

3) Marble Blast series

Marble Blast is a series by GarageGames, although the rights to the series have since been lost by the studio. Both Marble Blast Gold and Marble Blast Ultra are no longer available for purchase in an official capacity, and that's a shame, as the games are some of the best in the ball-rolling genre. Ultra consists of 60 levels, spread across three difficulties of 20 levels apiece. Each introduces new gameplay mechanics into the mix, such as gravity, the need to plan careful jumps across dangerous gaps, and special items. I can only hope that the duo of Marble Blast games somehow gets another chance to shine.

2) Kororinpa series

Kororinpa: Marble Mania, and to a lesser extent, its sequel, Marble Saga: Kororinpa, are Nintendo Wii games that put all of the courses of the game into your hands. You see, the Wii Remote is used to tilt the levels to move around your marble through, requiring not only speed to beat the times, but also precision and accuracy, especially for the harder levels with more places to fall off. The sequel offers the ability to create your own levels, which adds great replay value and longevity to the game. Unlockable levels and marbles also increases this. What you are left with is a pair of ball-rollers that are absolutely charming and fun to play.

1) Super Monkey Ball series

Now, is it really fair to call the Super Monkey Ball series number one when most of its games aren't very good? I believe that the original Super Monkey Ball and its sequel (perhaps even the Game Boy Advance game, too) are so fun and well done that they more than enough make the Super Monkey Ball series worthy of being number one on this list. Controlling Aiai and his monkey cohorts through colorful and increasingly more challenging and creative levels is a blast, and the arcade nature of the game makes it so you're always trying to make a little more progress in the game with each attempt. I say "attempt" because these games are mighty difficult, even for a seasoned player of the genre. Throw in some excellent mini-games, and the choice of Super Monkey Ball as my number one pick is just the way the ball bounces.

Top Ten Nintendo Wii Games You May Not Have Heard Of

The Nintendo Wii is a system that I believe will be thought of more fondly in the future. As of right now it is a popular lightning rod for hatred from a certain sect of gamer. The main argument is that the console has a limited amount of compelling games. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth. It's almost as if these gamers only consider big blockbusters to be worthy of their attention and not the smaller, more niche software. This list focuses on the latter. These are titles that not only received little to no publicity (except maybe outside of the occasional one page magazine advertisement), but these are ones that you may not even know exist! It's important to note that I obviously have not played every Wii game in existence, so if your favorite game that you believe no one outside of a small percentage of people have heard of isn't represented on this list, don't be offended. These are the games that I am most familiar with.

10) Go Vacation

Welcome to Kawawii Island, your virtual getaway destination with four specific resorts to explore and play around in: Marine, City, Snow, and Mountain. Go Vacation is essentially a mini-game collection that strives to be much more. For instance, the various resorts you visit act like a sandbox. You can find and participate in unique activities like ATV races, jetski competitions, tennis, equestrian games, scuba diving, skydiving, skateboarding, mini golf, and many more. Some activities control better than others, but the majority of them exude plenty of entertainment.

Journeying across the four resorts offers plenty of opportunities for exploration including uncovering hidden treasure chests that contain gear for your avatar character, photo ops, missions to complete, and other optional tasks. The game focuses heavily on customization as well. You can earn silver keys from finishing off all challenges for a specific activity to unlock different types of furniture for your villa. From getting your interior decorator on with villa creation to personalizing the look of your in-game avatar, there's plenty of room to show off your creativity. Then there's the clean presentation of the game and the absolutely infectious music. Sometimes soothing, sometimes something from 80s pop, it all sounds terrific. Go Vacation sold relatively well in Japan - it even received an Iwata Asks segment. Unfortunately, the sales didn't carry over to North America.

9) The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces

From the team behind the Ace Combat series, Project Aces made a companion game to The Sky Crawlers anime movie. As you can probably guess since Project Aces is aboard, the high flying dogfight-ing turmoil of Innocent Aces is quite high. Whether your mission is to obliterate all enemies from the sky, take out specific targets, or defend a supply freighter or friendly base, you have a heap of aerial action to satiate your thirst for high octane heroics. There are several plane types that you are assigned to using on special missions that add some artificial difficulty to the game, such as having to use a horrible to maneuver aircraft in Senryu to save your squadmates with a panic-inducing strict time limit to boot.

The difficulty is uneven throughout the game, but overcoming it yields great rewards as the gameplay is just so brilliant. Taking down enemy fighters with TMC moves or Tactical Maneuver Commands allow you to shoot down foes effortlessly and while doing so in style. Primary and secondary weapons for each aircraft offer alternative methods to achieve your quota for destruction. Apart from the flying, you might find yourself just soaring around the skies freely just to marvel at the magnificent music and surrounding locales. The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces released at the price point of $30 USD, so it is bound to be even less now.

8) Kororinpa: Marble Mania

Following the lead of Sega's Super Monkey Ball series, Hudson Soft's Kororinpa: Marble Mania has players tilting and rotating the Wii remote to maneuver the simple-at-the-start, complicated-later-on levels of the game. It sounds like child's play, but things become much more challenging later on down the line when a player has to deal with moving platforms, narrow pathways, and an abundance of rail-free sections of levels. The object of each Kororinpa level is to collect all of the colored crystals to unlock the goal which the player must then reach. There are over 50 unique levels in the game to become victorious on as well as to master. Players earn trophies based on their time besting a level, either gold, silver, or bronze.

After a round of levels has been completed, players are whisked away to new level types with different environments. From tranquil gardens to sickening sweet confectionery delights to roll your marble on, there's no shortage of locales to be had. Unlockable marbles each with their own stats and secret, much more arduous levels add to the replay value of the game. A sequel would be made called Marble Saga: Kororinpa, which would allow players to devise and create their own levels. The reason I chose the original Kororinpa is because that of the two games, Marble Mania is considered the rarer of the two, thus giving it more of chance that many haven't heard of it.

7) Dewy's Adventure

After a near launch title for the Wii in Elebits (which one could argue deserves to be on this list as well) was completed, the development team began work on a totally different project and new intellectual property starring a dew droplet appropriately named Dewy. Dewy's Adventure follows the cutesy water droplet as he tries to abolish the threat of Black Water from the land. The game uses the Wii remote held horizontally and has players tilting it to move Dewy around. Sometimes it can feel like you're sliding him around like butter on a hot skillet, but more often than not this works.

Dewy isn't your ordinary living droplet of water either. He has the power to affect the weather. Many times these powers allow him to advance in the various worlds and levels in the game by solving puzzles and taking down large groups of baddies. He can create strong winds that put some foes to sleep. He can summon disastrous earthquakes to destroy boulders in his way, and he can turn to ice to freeze bodies of water, allowing Dewy to cross them without worry. Experimenting with Dewy's various forms is always recommended for when players reach a dead end. I proudly have my Dewy pre-order plushie presented on one of my shelves. I know the game did not receive its fair share of fanfare - and Konami is much less willing to risk money in unsure ideas - but I would love to see Dewy return to the gaming landscape.

6) We Love Golf!

At its outward appearance, We Love Golf! is a standard fare Japanese-centric golf game containing an abundance of colorful anime-esque characters and bright and cheery courses. Delving more inside the core of the game, you realize that We Love Golf! is a remarkably deeper and more rewarding game than you first realized. Tournament mode puts players against a field of 29 names who all vie for the spot of number one as they play 18 holes of a given golf course. The player with the best score at the conclusion of 18 holes is deemed the champion. There are three difficulties with regards to Tournament: the regular Tournament, the more sloped greens and tougher conditions of the Pro Tournament, and the agonizingly challenging Mirror Tournament.

At the start of the game, your choices of courses and golfers are limited, but by the end of the game you have eight courses (not including the three short courses) and a dozen or so bland golfing personalities (though the personality problem is lessened when you unlock Capcom-themed costumes for your characters such as Apollo Justice, Arthur from Ghost 'n' Goblins, and Chun-Li of Street Fighter fame). Unfortunately, I can only imagine that the publisher of the game, Capcom, was banking on Nintendo fans buying the game solely because Camelot developed it. This did not happen. Even with its addicting and rewarding gameplay, bounty of unlockables, online play, and clever course design, We Love Golf! was mightily overlooked and uncelebrated by Wii owners. In fact, I surmise that more Wii owners know of Super Swing Golf than Camelot's wonderful golfing game.

5) Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

I hesitated to put this game on the list because it has been the subject of a metric ton of sales, usually putting the game around the extraordinarily-worth-it five dollar price point to pick up. The original Sin and Punishment released on the Nintendo 64, but it was only available in Japan up until the game came out on the Wii's Virtual Console service in late 2007. The game was 100% true to the original game. Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is the first sequel of that Nintendo 64 classic and the first to get a retail release in the west. Players take on the role of either a boy or a girl in this 3D shoot 'em up. Players zoom in and out of areas, bombarding baddies with blasts and melee attacks to send their shots back at them, and battle big bosses with most levels consisting of multiple encounters with more powerful creatures.

This Treasure-developed game rewards players with not getting hit by increasing their score multiplier. Some serious scoring can be done if one doesn't lose their multiplier by taking damage. Scores can even be compared online on the leaderboards, so it's great to literally shoot for number one. If you don't like aiming by pointing at the screen with the Wii remote (why you wouldn't is beyond me), you can opt to use a GameCube controller or use the Classic Controller. From discovering a boss's weak point to the adrenaline rush of carefully dodging a flurry of fiery shots, Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is a terrific title. It's just a shame that Nintendo of America let it slip through the cracks instead of letting people know more about the game. That notwithstanding, I guess we should be glad they even decided to localize the game, judging by their recent history.

4) Fishing Resort

Fishing Resort was developed by Prope, a studio founded by Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka.While his games after leaving Sonic Team and Sega have not been significant sellers, the originality and quality of each game has been pretty much all top-of-the-line. Speaking of lines (at least in regards to fishing lines), Fishing Resort puts players on a vacation-like island full of different locales. Fish in the steamy jungle, go ice fishing on the island's tall glacier mountains, or just relax by the beach for some good ol' fishin' fun. The actual fishing has players casting the line with the Wii remote and reeling fish in by performing circular motions with the nunchuk. It can feel like an exercise when one is trying to nab something as ferocious as a ten-foot barracuda!

Also, there are twenty or so fishing-related mini-games such as casting one's line to fall within a target with varying scores based on how close they reach the bull's eye. In addition to the mini-games, players can also strive to catch the hundreds of fish types to add to their collection or give to the local aquarium. There's even online leaderboards as well as local play for up to four anglers to try to determine who is the top fisherman. The customization is also very nice, allowing players to dress up, equip themselves with the best bait and rod for the right occasion, and personalize themselves as they see fit. Fishing Resort released late last year (with or without a special peripheral), and it sort of got away from most gamers like a tough-to-catch fish.

3) Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy

Based off the game by Kenta Cho, Tuniki Fighters, Blast Works' gameplay is a 2D shoot 'em up with a twist. Destroyed enemies can attach themselves to the player's ship, allowing them to act as either extra protection or even extra offense. For example, if a defeated enemy with a cannon falls onto the player's ship, it will intermittently fire at foes as long as it is in commission. This gameplay element serves as something refreshing for a game that might be considered stale without it. But then these people who might consider it stale otherwise haven't met the exhaustive editing tools Blast Works possesses. Players can build their own fighters, enemies, buildings and other architecture for backgrounds, and design their own levels. Or, if one lacks the creative touch to design something wholly original, they can edit already created assets and add a personalized touch to them. These creations could be shared on the official Blast Works site and be shared via the seldom used WiiConnect24 function. Blast Works is like the LittleBigPlanet of shoot 'em up games with a ton of customization and the gameplay to back it up. For twenty dollars (USD) at release, the game was a brilliant bargain. It still is today.

2) The Munchables

Alluding to another one of Namco Bandai's games, Katamari Damacy, the goal of each level in The Munchables is to try to grow your hungry mascot as large as possible. The main attraction to The Munchables is to gobble up enemies. Each level, you start fresh. A predetermined size is given to you at the beginning of a level. Your size is indicated by a level number. You can easily eat up smaller enemies, but if an enemy has a higher level than you, your Munchable won't be able to fit its jaws around it. In this case, you have to attack the enemy so it will divide itself into smaller, lower level enemies. For each enemy you digest, you earn a meal point. These are totaled up at the end of the level to reward you a letter ranking based on your performance, up to an "S" ranking. In order to maximize your meal counter, you'll want to go to town on several space pirates in a row. The more you eat in a continuous manner without taking much of a breather, the higher the meal bonus you'll acquire. You can hold down the chow down button to charge at enemies with your mouth open for a relatively swift way to digest a myriad of adversaries.

There's eight worlds to complete, each with three stages. The third of which is always a boss battle against a food-related foe like a bad piece of broccoli or a sour attitude vine of grapes. Even after the game is completed, a mirror mode unlocks. Then there's unlockable costumes and secrets in each level to discover. The Munchables will no doubt satisfy your craving for something colorful and fresh. Additionally, The Munchables was so overlooked by gamers that SuperPhillip Central was actually the first place to review the game. That's saying something.

1) Excitebots: Trick Racing

In the world of Excitebots: Trick Racing, obtaining first place is not good enough to win. No, no. You have to win in style. By choosing one of many already unlocked or secret bot vehicles which range from a rat to a lobster, players speed through tracks strewn across the world and even in space. Through each of a given race's three laps, players must earn stars through doing a bevy of cool tricks and stunts such as spinning multiple times in midair, smashing into another vehicle, kicking a field goal through the uprights, scoring a soccer goal, knocking down ten bowling pins to achieve a strike, collecting a group of butterflies, playing the role of a daredevil and flirting with danger by passing through a narrow path surrounded by trees, and other incredible feats of amazement. For every successful trick or stunt a racer pulls off, they earn stars (a bonus of stars is rewarded to first place). The racer with the most stars at the conclusion of a race is determined the victor.

Excitebots is a tremendous arcade racer that will certainly get the adrenaline going. One might think that using the Wii remote to steer and perform tricks would be - for lack of a better word - tricky, but that honestly couldn't be more of a folly to believe. The racing feels absolutely sensational, and I couldn't imagine playing the game with a regular controller. The level of fun would be lessened. Excitebots: Trick Racing was released with no applause or recognition on its release - not even by Nintendo. It never even made it to Europe, sadly, so Europeans missed out on a stellar racer, though they did get to experience the launch game, Excite Truck, which Excitebots is a spiritual sequel of. Excitebots: Trick Racing is definitely worth a look as it has a remarkable sense of speed, action, entertainment, great online, and loads to unlock.

===

The Wii library is so robust that there are plenty of other titles that I would have liked to have listed here but could not because of the ten game limit. I am referring to titles like A Boy and His Blob, Endless Ocean and its sequel, MySims Racing, Opoona, Zack & Wiki: Quest For Barbaros' Treasure, MLB Power Pros, and a wide assortment of others. The Wii truly has a tremendous library, given you take the opportunity to banish the preconceived notions of the system you might have and actually attempt to give the library a chance.

Marble Saga: Kororinpa (Wii) Review

I really liked Kororinpa: Marble Mania. It didn't set my world on fire, but it was a very enjoyable experience regardless. Now we have Marble Saga: Kororinpa, one of my most anticipated Wii games. It's only thirty dollars, too. Why? Because that's how it rolls. Here's my review of Marble Saga: Kororinpa.

Get Ready to Lose Your Marbles.

An object rolling through multiple perilous mazes, attempting to reach the goal in each one, isn't a new concept at all. Of course, they've been around long before the days of Marble Madness with those wooden labyrinth toys you'd tilt to get all of the iron balls into the goal. Wii owners especially have already seen an abundance of these types of games with Super Monkey Ball, Mercury Meltdown, the marble game from Wii Fit, and a little known title called Kororinpa: Marble Mania, now one of the rarest titles in the Wii's library. The game was fun but flawed. Controlling your marble through the many Kororinpa or levels the game threw at you was very intuitive and easy enough to do. The only problem was that you essentially only got one level per dollar of the $40 price tag. Rising to criticism, Hudson has released the sequel, Marble Saga: Kororinpa, with 150 unique levels and an editor to boot, but is this package all that it should have been?

The main course of Marble Saga is a story mode featuring an extremely simple and superfluous tale revolving around an ant named Anthony. He needs the Golden Sunflower to save his land, but the catch is that the treasure is sealed up inside the Stump Temple. Traveling from area to area, level to level, it's your job to collect Stump Pieces as you roll through dozens of levels. This is what you'll be playing through to unlock most of the content inside Marble Saga. Thought-provoking narrative this ain't, but it does the job all the same.

Spider-Marble does whatever a spider can.

There are several themed areas you and Anthony must travel through from sandy dunes to the ocean blue. Each area has ten main levels to conquer. These can be tackled in any order once you've unlocked the latter five levels of an area. Once the eleventh level, a slightly more difficult challenge level, is completed, you open up the next area on the world map to explore. It's not as simple as going from point A to point B. It's about going from point A to point B while collecting all of the orange crystals to unlock the goal. This isn't that elementary of a task either as the levels in Marble Saga aren't as simple as rolling down a straight line. No, no. Quite the contrary. The early areas will have more railings to protect your marble from falling off, small hills and curves to roll through, and small challenges. Slick floors, pinball bumpers, cannons that shoot you across the level, tubes, marble ball-obliterating hazards like spiked balls, and much more aim to cost you a good time. Thankfully, most levels have multiple checkpoints. Annoyingly, you get a three second penalty each time you fall... which you will do a lot. There's also a green crystal hidden in a dastardly location in each level, most of which are either hard-to-find and/or hard-to-reach, that unlock new marbles with varying stats from a hard-to-slow-down baseball to a flatulent panda of ultimate win.

Let your marble experience a mosh-pit firsthand
by getting between two of those bad boys.

Unlike the original Kororinpa, Marble Saga gives the player the choice between two control schemes for the story mode, both of which are Wii remote only. There are a few dozen levels which support Nintendo's balance board peripheral. Those without the accessory can still play the levels, but the mazes really were made for the balance board in mind. Heading back to Wii remote controls, you can play with the Wii remote vertically or horizontally. The question is if you'll want to even bother playing horizontally as it's pretty poor-- especially for moments where you have to turn to the level to its side. What I mean is that in Kororinpa you aren't controlling the marble. You're tilting the level to make your marble move. The majority of levels require the player to twist the Wii remote in order to turn the level over so the marble can cross a platform perpendicular to the one it's already on.

Those with vertigo should not play Marble Saga: Kororinpa.

This is where part of the trouble with Marble Saga rears its ugly head. Holding the remote flat levels out the maze completely, but many levels force you to twist your wrist every which way but Subway to manipulate the movement of your marble. Oftentimes, you'll need to twist the remote completely upside-down. Now this would all be fine and dandy like the controls of the original Kororinpa expect in Marble Saga, for some unexplained reason the way you hold the Wii remote doesn't necessarily match how the maze is currently titled causing not only confusion but great frustrating. Add into this that nearly all of the marbles are a pain to maneuver in this sequel. Why keep a good thing-- the original's fantastic physics-- when you can ruin them to be borderline broken on most levels? Let me ask Hudson some time. In the original twisting the Wii remote slightly would slightly tilt the maze, slowly moving your marble. This isn't the case in Marble Saga. Tilting a little bit will do nothing, or your marble will move so sluggishly that doesn't have any momentum whatsoever. Tilt the Wii remote enough so it actually moves, and now it's too fast to stop before teetering off the edge of the maze. To further cause frustration is the camera which is always facing one angle. Moving the maze can sometimes result in not being able to see your marble as it's rolling or having your marble fall over the edge on a horizontal straightaway due to an odd angle, altering your depth perception.

If constantly failing the story mode mazes gets you down, you can always check out the robust level creator. If you can think it, you can most likely build it, and then send it to your friends via WiiConnect24. Unfortunately, the "quirky" design choices don't end with the gameplay. Almost every worthwhile construction piece must be made by combining multiple materials. Where are these materials found? Why, in story mode, of course! Look forward to playing through the same levels over and over again just to grind for materials needed to build cool doodads and gadgets. The chore of collecting materials will probably be worth it to some as you can make some really intriguing levels for your friends to tackle. Additionally, Hudson will be continually supporting online with new mazes of their own.

This little piggy rolled all the way home.

For all my issues with the controls, Marble Saga's presentation isn't too shabby. A comparison of backgrounds from the original to backgrounds of Marble Saga are like night and day. Marble Saga has much more detailed backgrounds filled with things to make it look busy and full of life without being distracting. The music can get stuck in your head as it's quite catchy while other times songs can be completely forgettable.

It's somewhat baffling to me the decisions made by third parties on the Wii. It's as if the Wii makes them do incredibly foolish things. In Hudson's case it's totally taking the perfect physics and feel of Kororinpa and mutilating them horribly to a shallow shell of their former selves. Regardless of my abundant disappointment with this sequel, for $30 you may find that you don't care either way. For me, it made the game much more difficult to control and enjoy. Marble Saga: Kororinpa rolls off the edge and plunges into the bottomless abyss below.

[SuperPhillip Says: 4.5/10]