Posted by Shawn M. on Aug 3rd, 2007
While popping in an Xbox 360 game disk is great fun, let’s not forget about Microsoft’s other method of game delivery, Xbox Live Arcade. In what I hope will be a regular feature around these parts, I’ll take a look at some of the best (and worst) that Arcade has to offer. Now, onto the review!
Marble Blast Ultra
Published by Garage Games
Released January 25th, 2006
800 MSPoints (10 USD)
This is going to be a great review to write, because it’s going to be so simple. After all, there is no story or plot to speak of in MBU. No princesses in peril, no gun-toting mutants, or no world to be saved. It’s just your marble and some fiendishly clever levels.
In MBU, your marble begins a stage and must progress through each stage to reach the goal. Most times, you will have to clear environmental challenges to reach the goal, though sometimes you will have to roll over a few scattered gems before the goal area is activated. MBU features sixty single-player levels, split into three sections: Easy, Intermediate, and Expert. The easy levels are just that — easy, as you’ll roll through these twenty stages learning the various mechanics of the game. Intermediate will give you more of a challenge, and Expert will have you ripping out your hair (or swearing at the television, as I’m inclined to do). You can take as much time as you need to finish a stage, but each stage features a par time. Finishing each difficulty level’s stages under par will net you Achievements. Throughout each level, you can roll over and collect power-ups that will help you out, including super-jumps, the ability to double your size, and super-speed. At higher levels, use of these power-ups is crucial in making it to the goal.
Even though the single player experience is fairly deep, the real fun in MBU comes from its fantastic multiplayer. Here, you’ll be rolling around various levels in search of gems, trying to reach them before the other players do. Gems typically spawn five or six at a time, and once they are collected, a new batch will randomly appear somewhere else in the level. Each session lasts for three minutes, and whoever has collected the most gems during this interval wins. As with the single player game, you can collect power-ups that will help you out against your opponents.
Graphically, the game is crisp. The stages are constructed from simple geometric shapes and tiles. Your marble is simple as well — not that it needs to be ultra-detailed, but you can choose from almost forty skins to dress it up a bit. The most important graphical aspect of this game is the smooth-as-silk framerate. However, during multiplayer, the game will tend to lag a bit if the host player has a less-than-optimal connection.
Control is spot on. Your marble’s movement is very intuitive and responsive — I’ve yet to experience any cheapness from the game’s control scheme. The music is nice but forgettable, and whenever you pick up a power-up, a Brit-accented female’s voice will tell you what you have.
There are a couple of things that aren’t totally great, though. As with a lot of games, the camera can go a bit wonky in close-quarter situations. If you decide to join a multiplayer game, you’ll more often than not be dropped into a game already in progress, sometimes where another player has such an overwhelming number of gems that you have no chance of winning. However, once that game is over, players from that game can stick around and start a new one (as long as the host player continues, that is). There are also a few minor glitches, but somebody has to really know what they’re doing to actually glitch the game.
As with all Live Arcade Games, you can download the demo for free. You can try out a couple of the single player levels, and you can also jump into a multiplayer game (for about seven minutes, then the demo will stop). But if you ask me — and I’m assuming you would, if you’ve made it this far — Marble Blast Ultra is a nice, fun game well worth the ten bucks. The single-player levels are challenging, and the multiplayer is great fun. Give the demo a try, at least, and don’t be surprised if the full version of the game ends up on your hard drive.
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