Friday, May 16, 2003

All hail the Top 100 Video Games of All Time, which somehow omits favorites of mine like Myst and Riven. And I never got the fascination with the whole Mario Brothers thing -- the original Donkey Kong was fun, but the subsequent entries in the Mario franchise never did it for me.

And my favorite game of all time is one whose name I cannot recall for the life of me. The player is a guy who is faced with bouncing balls of various size, and he has to pop them using these ropes-with-grappling-hooks that he shoots straight up, deploying them to break the balls in two. The balls get smaller each time you pop them, until they disappear entirely....in the first screen you're faced with a single, large ball, which you then break into two, then those into four, and then into eight smallest-sized ones that finally disappear when you pop them. When you clear a screen of balls, you advance to the next screen, which has different combinations of obstacles and balls to pop. Does this ring any bells with anybody out there? I ruled on this game in college....probably because it wasn't all that popular of a game, and thus I was always able to play it. But the patterns of balls-to-obstacles created interesting spatial puzzles to solve.

No comments: