Timeball review

Game: Timeball
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Genre: Casual (Puzzle)
Developer: Hudson Soft
AKA: Blodia (JP)

Featured reader review by goldenvortex

November 25, 2005

Some bad games can be relatively tolerated to a certain extent. Nickelodeon GUTS was pathetic but it was rather funny to make ordinary kids pull off flips that would make any Olympic acrobat cry like a baby. Dark Castle was a stinker and a half but the sheer hilarity of playing as an escaped vegetable gave it an incredibly small sliver of merit. Some bad games can do that and sometimes (when you're incredibly bored) you can fire them up and laugh at them, if you haven't microwaved the CD/cartridge first. Then, you get games that don't just cross the line of poorness/hilarity; they throw up on it.

Blodia may be the only current example of that type of bad game. Out of all the games I have picked up through the course of my hobby, only Blodia has made me feel bored, frustrated, tired AND rather sick simultaneously. Playing Blodia is like sitting through church, waiting at the dentist with a major toothache, watching paint dry and getting gallstones on one day, that day being your birthday. If you can imagine that, then you have a somewhat censored rendition of what playing Blodia is like.

All that the game entails is for you to guide a small marble through a series of tubes, which you must connect together. You have a series of track parts and you have to arrange the parts so they connect with each other so the small ball doesn’t run out of track and smash. Basically, you have to use your problem solving abilities to rearrange the track to guide the ball to the end. Once the ball completes a section of the track, the track disappears. This keeps on going until the entire track has been used up.

That probably sounds just as boring as the events I listed earlier. However, don’t get too enthused yet as you’ll find that Blodia gets even duller and even more depressing. The game features one hundred levels rife the same slow paced action, tracks show a bit of variation in amount and even overlap each other but, try to vary as they may, even tricky track combinations cannot roll Blodia away from its fundamental problems. The time waiting for the ball to reach the area of the track you just arranged feels like a century, with every second feeling like someone driving an icicle into your spine and twisting it around slowly. Then, it’s followed by a sharp and tense feeling of indigestion as you realize that you’ve gotten so bored waiting that you’ve made a mistake with the track arrangement. This then leads to a sharp pain in your knuckles as your fist clashes with your monitor.

In an attempt to cure your boredom and calm your rage, you can choose between the generous amount of not one, but two music tracks. You get some weak humor from the cheap translation of the song Labylinth, a track that is surprisingly good (for this game’s standards anyway) and the rather similar but less humorous Olivia. BUT, don’t fret my friend because if these tracks irritate you, you can choose to play the game in COMPLETE AND UTTER SILENCE!!! The choice is yours!

I really can’t imagine anything more boring than Blodia. The concept is dreary enough but the fact that we have a ton of levels that contain the same monotonous task is obviously unforgivable. It’s even worse when this task actually requires your full attention in order to be successfully completed. Imagine the task that stills your brain the most, it can’t even compare to the tedium and frustration brought forth by the repetitive tasks here. Don’t even bother buying or even downloading Blodia, it’ll mercilessly snatch away five minutes of your time and leave you even more bored than you were before you fired up the machine to play. It’s like getting your hand crushed inside some revolving cogs and then covering it in salt, downright painful.

Beware of the ball!
0

Rating: 1/10

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