Airball (NES) review "Any boy transformed into an inflatable purple ball by a wizard probably needs a few breaks. Especially when the wizard won't reverse the spell until the boy retrieves a spell book and six trinkets from inside a massive isometric spike-garden maze. That's the story of Airball, ported from an opaque, over-exacting PC game to a fascinating prototype in the NES's twilight era. It's still got over two hundred junior-grade Escher rooms with the forty-five degree rotated isometric view, but it a..."

Any boy transformed into an inflatable purple ball by a wizard probably needs a few breaks. Especially when the wizard won't reverse the spell until the boy retrieves a spell book and six trinkets from inside a massive isometric spike-garden maze. That's the story of Airball, ported from an opaque, over-exacting PC game to a fascinating prototype in the NES's twilight era. It's still got over two hundred junior-grade Escher rooms with the forty-five degree rotated isometric view, but it adds two easier levels of difficulty and more sensible controls, and it peels the wizard off the instruction manual and onto the game.

Where easy mode lets you learn the basics: holding your controller at forty-five degrees, rolling around spikes, changing direction mid-jump, how far you can jump, and bouncing up stairs. The items--dragon, Buddha, beans, flask, crucifix and pumpkin--appear before the darkened areas, and the entry provides the only significant branches in the sub-maze. You can hold select to levitate over spikes, though they don't damage you much, so you won't need the twiddly air pumps in odd rooms that re-inflate your ball. Learning when and how to roll around to trigger semi-hidden squares and tricky jumps is preparation for finding secret doors deeper in the maze, and detecting half of a glowing item behind a wall is the hardest bit here. Brute-force logic should carry you through.

Then comes the medium level and realism. Your ball now deflates over time, and over-inflating your ball explodes it. Falling too far also fizzes your ball out like a popped balloon. No more levitation; the select button is reserved for moving fast, which you may need if you're low on air. So archways to the next room, with pits on the other side, are death traps. There's no shame in crawling back to easy, where you can take the lamp and explore those darker areas not necessary yet. You'll get all the tries you'll need to jump across big gaps or traverse that spiral walkway, as you discover several rooms where you really hope the treasures won't be.

Medium leaves worst of them for hard but still forces you into the pumpkin-patch maze of forty rooms, which your deflation makes a timed run. And you'll need the barrel, a non-treasure, in several places as a makeshift step to reach archways to new rooms. Medium mode allows clever shortcuts such as getting strategically killed after taking a valuable item, which sends you to the last air pumps you used, or slipping through inconveniently placed spikes to finish a room quickly.

No such luck on hard mode. Nicking any spike finishes you. Getting items in the wrong order slows you immensely. The lantern from the previous to levels has died but can serve as a second stool. You'll need it, along with a third stool, a good map and probably even a 3-d diagram to work out a few swerve-jumps. Oh, and two items here cost a life to take. You have four lives total.

Which, along with no continues and no introductory puzzles, makes the PC version wretchedly backbreaking. The NES gives three, and it lets you center your ball on a tile. Each room is 8x8, but your ball rolls continuously, so unless you stop for a few seconds, it's often on several tiles at once. Then it sits squarely on whichever it covers most. This costs time and air, so you need to find the best rooms to take this needed break from pinpoint accuracy while rolling or making diagonal jumps.

And this leeway helps soften Airball's quirks to allow for humor and wonder. The tiger-heads and coffins, while scarier than the spikes, are harmless and allows for useful landmarking, while the more hidden spikes are, the more stressful avoiding them can be. Rooms have guiding landmarks that help you keep your bearings, except for clear maze puzzles. Everything helps except for hands on assorted pedestals, which point in no particular direction. Your ball sags pitifully when you need to inflate it, letting you watch the game and not the health bar. A relaxing and catchy composition of triads scales up and down, with a light drumbeat in the background, and the colors do well not to trump the architecture. Some rooms have an ice tower theme, and others are botanic, but the general muted red-and-tan of the spikes and floor avoid flashy overkill. One dark secluded room features fifteen fake flasks and a real one. I ran out of air just before realizing two visual clues made guessing unnecessary.

Then there's the wizard: like his puzzles, a piece of work. Despite his nasty puzzles, he has a heart. You have a chance to decline, foolishly, a rhetorical question. He gives three "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE" continues if you run out of lives. And on the harder modes, the crucifix appears in the restart room. The high-score list is also topsy-turvy. Random gems add more to your score than finding the treasures, and it's easy to picture the wizard, amused at how his puzzles fluster you, giving you points as alms. One stretch of the maze has twenty-four rooms in a row where raised tiles spell out a message you'll lose most of your ball's air reading. So if you're willing to accept that a ball can pick up items or jump on a candle, the wizard is very believable as an eccentric loner who enjoys sadistic puzzles. Especially when he waits until you bounce onto your boat to zap you back into a boy. You can enjoy his vast puzzle-garden, but his living quarters are verboten.

The effect a simple storyline and a few common-sense tweaks had on Airball's playability is staggering. The gradation in puzzles makes it even fairer than your usual perfectly linear puzzle game that leaves a player stuck halfway when the difficulty jumps after some trivial introductory puzzles. Given how satisfying solving easy can be, and how radically different all three levels' solutions are, Airball seems suited for both the casual and dedicated action-puzzle gamer. And it's easy enough to run through for some beautiful scenery, too.

Community review by aschultz (June 22, 2009) Andrew Schultz used to write a lot of reviews and game guides but made the transition to writing games a while back. He still comes back, wiser and more forgiving of design errors, to write about games he loved, or appreciates more, now.