#BALLBLAZER

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[scummrevisited]

seeing return to monkey island next to ballblazer is really funny to me. its like guybrush's baby photos

[erigold13261]

📢Psychonauts NSR AU Observations, Chapter 2: Cast Tech District📢

Qwasasync-Tower

Milla: Ugh, ever since I was a child. NSR had these things here when they arrived. I still hate these things. Ugh!

Sasha: According to some information. These towers transfer power from the Grand Qwasa through resonance… this… this is actually interesting.

Microphobes

Milla: Ooh! A Microphobe ™! If me and Sasha get like I don’t know… roughly 500 of these. We can have a swarm to take down NSR! Hahaha!

Sasha: I’ve heard about these things. But I’ve never seen a Microphobe ™ swarm. I think that Milla wants to fix this. But I’m not so sure… after all, they are too complex to repair.

Download Now Poster

Milla: “Exclusive for one night only! DJ Cold Comet Crispin’s Underground Rave!” Yeah, no. Just, just no.

Sasha: “One night only concert may be extended beyond one night…” Oh dear. Does this mean he will end up having a ‘One Night Only’ event being extended. I remember the last artist who did this, things were bad. 30 people ended up being hospitalized due to seizures from the flickering lights, there was a traffic jam that lasted for 12 hours, and 25 streets got involved in a black out! That incident was so bad, the artist ended up saying ‘Oops’ in court. It was so bad. So… so… so bad.

Ol’ Timey Radio

Milla: I used to listen to Septentrion with my vovó. She never understood the lyrics. But we laughed and sang the lyrics all day… I still miss those times.

Sasha: These things used to be very popular until NSR stepped in. The newer models were so over-taxed that you ended up finding old models like these.

DJ CCC Plushie (Fanmade)

Milla: Huh, a plushie themed after DJ CCC? Is it bad that I want to keep this?

Sasha: I never knew that DJ CCC had a plush toy of himself. Well, the more you know, the more you’ll learn.

Star Sign Superstars (Fanmade)

Milla: I remember that Arcade Game in high-school! Man, the bossfight against Ophiuchus was hard, even on easy mode… I still have that ban from that Ballblazer Arcade, it wasn’t my fault that I am easily competitive. Ugh!

Sasha: Hmm, 'Star Sign Superstars’? I’ve heard about this game. Thankfully the sequel was far more better. Due to the difficulty level being toned down a bit.

DJ CCC-Branded Frozen Yogurt Machine (Fanmade)

Milla: Oh man, these things look so good! 'Much-of-Choco Mars’, 'Very Berry Venus’? These things are sooo tasty! I just want to have a taste of these! But Sasha won’t let me have one!

Sasha: “Have a wonderful taste of the Galaxy in ten flavors!” Oh dear, can’t let Milla have these. The last time she had frozen yogurt, she passed out in a with paint everywhere.

Dr. Touch-Branded Boombox (Fanmade)

Milla: OMG! OMG! OMG! IT’S A DR. TOUCH-BRANDED BOOMBOX! I MUST HAVE IT! I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THESE THINGS ARE STILL HERE!

Sasha: Ah Dr. Touch, he was an expert on the keyboard. I’ve heard that he now goes by Otto Mentalis, and he specializes in science. He was also my professor during college. I haven’t told Milla, but I wonder how would she react if I told her.

[everygame]

The Eidolon (Atari 8-Bit)

Developed/Published by: Lucasfilm Games / Epyx Released: 12/1985 Completed: 07/04/2023 Completion: Beat the final dragon. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

The Eidolon is one of the very first games I got for my Amstrad CPC. Mind those mail order club “eight CDs for a penny” scams, where you’d get a bunch of things for free as long as you give the company “implied license” for them to send you things at full price in future unless you can work your way out of it? Well, we definitely did one of those when I got my Amstrad CPC and my dad definitely managed to get out of it ahead… somehow. 

Of course, it depends on your definition of “ahead.” I was given full freedom to select the games I wanted for the Amstrad, and considering I was a tiny child it’s not like I had any (literally any) critical faculties. So I know we got the Amstrad CPC conversion of the original Star Wars Arcade machine. And outside of that, I know we got Inflitrator and I know we got The Eidolon.

Strangely, I’ve already written about Infiltrator once in passing, and in a write-up of one of Lucafilm’s “launch” releases, Rescue on Fractalus (the other, Ballblazer). With Infiltrator, I could never get the bloody helicopter to take off because I was a tiny child. With The Eidolon? The disk almost never worked.

So maybe we didn’t come out ahead, even for our penny. As far as Infiltrator, I remember getting the helicopter to take off once. With The Eidolon, I remember getting it to load once, or twice, being confused by what was going on, possibly seeing the first dragon that I’d looked at for so long on the back of the box, and giving up because I had no idea what to do.

Well, it’s 2023 and I have to say that with the manual to hand, the entire interne on offer, and “being an adult” it took me a bloody long time to understand what the fuck you’re supposed to do in this. 

To not get ahead of ourselves, let’s start with what The Eidolon is. It’s one of Lucasfilm’s second “wave” of releases from the end of 1985, which amounted to The Eidolon and Koronis Rift. These titles begin the “forgotten” era of Lucasfilm between Rescue and Fractalus/Ballblazer and Maniac Mansion, and are almost totally unheralded (although some people do seem to like Koronis Rift a lot.) Oddly–and I don’t have my copy of Rogue Leaders to hand, nor offhand knowledge if it even covers this–the unfettered creative hotbed of early Lucasfilm knocks out two games entirely built around the fractal landscapes of Rescue on Fractalus at once, which… well, I guess it’s efficient.

The Eidolon’s take is to just “flip” the mountain landscapes of Rescue on Fractalus to turn them into caves, which is, to be fair, a decent use. The problem is, unfortunately, the game designed around this. Designed by Charlie Kellner–who doesn’t seem to have stuck with video games after 1994’s the Page Master–the game was originally intended to be a narrative where the player plays as the dragon versus a knight, but due to the limits of what they could do with the Atari 8-bits they ended up sanding things off until all they had were, well, caves to walk around, and thanks to Charlie’s interest in HG Wells, the game suddenly became about an inventor of a mysterious craft being transported to the depths of his own mind which just happened to look exactly like a bunch of samey grey caves.

To be fair to Charlie, there’s a couple of firsts or near-firsts here. The Eidolon, in some respects, one of the earliest “first person shooters” considering that it’s the main way you interact with the world (even though, as I’ll go on to explain, not in a way you’d expect); Maze/Maze War from 1973 is definitely earlier, but there’s a dearth of examples in between, and this is (as far as I can be arsed to research) the earliest with smooth 3D movement. And The Eidolon is probably the first steampunk video game. Sure, the genre feels embarrassing now. But not if you were first!

Anyway. The Eidolon has a beautiful manual, written from the perspective of the inventor, that (unfortunately) it takes real effort to understand the intended play for, so I’ll summarise it here.

There are eight levels.

Your goal on each level is to defeat the dragon you’ll find somewhere in the maze. You can’t get to the dragon until you collect the associated crystals required to awaken in.

You collect the crystals by killing monsters, all of whom are sleeping in dead-ends in the maze until you wake them up by walking up to them.

You defeat monsters by shooting energy balls at them, usually the red ones. You’ve got four types of energy ball to fire: red (damaging), gold (only useful against some dragons, I think?), blue (freeze enemies), green (transform enemy into something else. Doesn’t transform dragons.)

Sometimes there are red energy balls flying around that will damage you; fire a red energy ball at them to turn them into a harmless gold energy ball.

Everything you do costs energy, but handily there are energy balls floating about all over the mazes and you can capture them.

When awoken, dragons will also fire energy balls at you, but you can capture those too!

You’ve got a time limit to finish the game, and only get a couple minutes added for each level you beat, so you can’t dawdle and need to accept you’ll have to map the mazes to actually finish the game (or *cough* find a map online *cough*).

You die when you run out of energy.

That’s about it, basically. It is not especially deep, and I have to admit once I’d finally worked it all out I was pretty disappointed it was this slight. While moving around the maze is breezy enough, the technical limitations make most of the action, at best, clumsy button bashing. Every enemy is just standing in a corner, basically waiting for you to walk up to them and fire just enough fireballs at them to kill them (it’s amusing that contemporary reviews complained “why can’t you talk to the monsters”) and combat with the dragons locks you into the space so you basically just have to hammer the “fire energy ball” and “capture energy ball” buttons as fast as you can to get it over with as quickly as possible. There’s supposedly some tactics to it, but fireballs are on screen for a handful of frames making it almost worthless to try and time it out.

In fact, playing this rather brutally aggravated my wrists as the final boss is a marathon of button bashing (I read one forum poster stating that they had to put their Atari on the floor to mash the spacebar with their foot!) and it leads to one of the most hilariously baffling ending sequence where (spoilers!) Robert Goulet hands you a pterodactyl egg. It is… not worth it.

I hate to say it but the problem with The Eidolon is that it’s not really… anything. It’s a collection of things, for sure, but they don’t actually add up to a video game. The only thing I really thought was that interesting was having to use the “transform” energy ball on certain enemies so you could defeat them, but that’s… not much.

It’s a real missed opportunity, too, because the smooth scrolling cave represented a perfect opportunity to push the CRPG forward. Yes, Ultima IV had really only just come out, but Wizardry had been kicking since 1981, and the tech here is good enough that it’s not like you have to do anything nearly as complex. Just a simple dungeon crawler would have been pretty incredible, but it’s possible I’m asking a bit much. I mean… if you really get down to it, Wolfenstein 3D is less complex than this, so it may simply be that this was the right seed of an idea at the wrong time technologically, and as soon as things moved forward a bit both Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld would be possible. The Eidolon just doesn’t really manage to be a forefather of either.

Will I ever play it again? I won’t. I did think about playing through the CPC version of this instead of the original, which is a bit more colourful if a touch slower. But I was worried it wouldn’t load properly. Some things stick with you..

Final Thought: Above I mentioned this was from Lucasfilm’s forgotten era, and I really do mean it: it’s quite remarkable how little information is about this game online despite being from one of the most beloved developers probably ever, and I do think it’s a shame, dead-end or not. I mean I’m very glad I finally played it. I got my dad’s penny worth. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[atariforce]

Atari 7800 video game console papercraft by kescha66

[ninjastar107]

[x]

[gaxiola1701]

I took a break from GDC work and returned to the retrogaming area for some Ballblazer. Since it's been a long time I chose Droid1 as the opponent. The C64 had a microSD card adapter by backbit.io that provides a menu system for autoloading and runing images from the card. Pretty neat! #gdc #gdc2019 #retrogaming #c64 #commodore64 #ballblazer #lucasfilmgames (at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvSeKWIAOyd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=egsii17fgn20

[rexandbalances]

Ballblazer feat Beastie Boys Romeo Knight

[never2k]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Never2K (@never2k.de)

Frühes #PvP 🤪 #BallBlazer von #LucasFilmGames für den #Amstrad / #Schneider #CPC Dir gefällt was du siehst und willst mehr? 🤪 ✅Follow, ✅Like, ✅Käsekuchen 😄 🕹️ www.Never2K.de #retrogames #videogame #oldgames #eurobox #letsplay #livestream #sony #atari #bigbox #amiga #commodore #c64 #megadrive #mastersystem #capcom #retrogaming #ps1 #retrogames #playstation #sega #dreamcast #nintendo64 #n64 #nintendo #diskette (hier: Baden-Württemberg, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CedzszGos4h/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[lordgamerson]

Ballblazer Commercial By Mr. Extreme

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[voidwrld]

[imadeletingmysocials]

[everygame]

Ballblazer (Atari 7800)

Developed/Published by: Lucasfilm Games / Atari Released: 04/1985 Completed: 12/11/2021 Completion: I really want to say I beat Droid 7 here but it beat me in sudden death a few times and I can’t be arsed with it any more! So… I beat six of nine droids. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

I was a bit confused for a minute here trying to remember why I’d placed Lucasfilm Games’ first two titles (this and Rescue on Fractalus) in early 1984 rather than 1985 when they came out, but then I remembered that they were actually finished then and had to sit about forever as Atari collapsed, and I felt it made more sense to actually situate them when they should have came out (and it’s worth noting that for a lot of players they came out in late 1983, as work-in-progress versions were leaked then, meaning some people played these games for nearly two years before they actually came out!)

Anyway to confuse things I decided the best version of Ballblazer to play was the Atari 7800 version, which didn’t come out till 1987, but after seeing the silky smooth visuals on Jeremy Parish’s NES Works it was obviously the one to go for (although I think I read somewhere that the soundtrack isn’t generative the way it was in the original Atari 800 release, which is a shame.)

I’ve really loved structuring which games I play because it’s led to me finally playing and discovering some titles that stand the test of time incredibly and some that were just never good, but I’ve not actually hit many titles where I’ve thought “oh, I can see why this was good at the time, but it doesn’t hold up.”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that this is how I feel about Lucasfilm’s first forays. Ballblazer (for it’s this one that I’m talking about now, you’ll have to hold on for my expose on Rescue on Fractalus) is a really fascinating attempt to make a 3D sports title without putting any form of rotation in the player’s hands. Players move forwards, backwards and strafe in the pursuit of a ball across a checkerboard pitch (court?) and every time they would lose sight of the ball (because it’s behind or to the side of them) the viewpoint shifts in 90 degree increments to keep the player aimed towards it. If they’ve got the ball? It shifts to always be facing their goal.

It’s elegant, in a way. It deals with a technical limitation and a limitation inherent in the available controls, and it makes something that’s really accessible… as long as you’ve read the manual, or someone is explaining it to you.

A bit like with Lords of Midnight, I have this vague memory that I might have played this on Amstrad CPC and not understood it at all, which must have been loads of players experience. Now that I get it, it’s 100% one of those games that you have to be playing against someone else. It’s a stunningly bare-bones release. It barely has a title screen, and while the manual (interestingly) spins that you’ve reached the final match of an intergalactic tournament, all you can do is basically play an exhibition match against another player or AI with nine different levels (you can change the length of a match, too, I guess.)

The game is a lot of fun (for a while) but if you’re on your lonesome, once you reach the higher levels of AI the flaws come tumbling out. Majorly, the game doesn’t really have good defensive play. Once your opponent has the ball, you’re stuck trying to dislodge it from them, and it tends to work out that a tackle from the side will just send the ball bouncing off the wall back to them as you spin wildly backwards, and if you’re tacking from the front it doesn’t really seem to do anything at all.

I think there’s some sort of timing aspect to it, maybe, but even pouring over the manual I never worked it out. It makes playing the game at a higher level a mad scramble to get the ball first, and if you fail, just hoping that you can position yourself in a way that does manage to dislodge the ball or you can get in front of the goal and stay on front of your opponent, which leads to a weird sort of stalemate.

And as elegant as the automatic direction switching is… it always manages to be at its most disorientating when it matters the most.

My suspicion is that these things don’t matter that much if you’re playing against another player, but to be honest I wasn’t bothered enough to make that happen. I find the whole package very charming, but it’s a bit of a curio now.

Will I ever play it again? I’d be totally interested to play it against someone, but if there was an Atari 800 set up somewhere I was I’d be gagging to play MULE over this.

Final Thought: A weird note here is that Rainbow Arts, German publisher of Turrican etc. put out a version of this for Amiga and called Master Blazer that bothers to put in a tournament mode. However Amiga Power never wrote about it even once (!) which makes me assume it’s not worth revisiting.

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[atariforce]

retro ATARI by mostyle

[vgprintads]

‘Masterblazer’

[MULTI] [GERMANY] [MAGAZINE] [1990]

“Masterblazer is both a remake of and a follow-up to the Lucasfilm Games game Ballblazer. Ballblazer is a futuristic sport played in vehicles called "Rotofoils". The play field is a large rectangle made out of squares. The object of the game is to get a ball called "Plasmorb" into the goal, which moves along the edge of the play field. Otherwise, the rules are simple: "Three minutes, two players, one victor!" The game is played in first-person on a split screen and can be played by either one or two players.” ~MobyGames

Source: Amiga Joker, December 1990 || Internet Archive; pedgarcia