Developed and published by Electronic Arts in 1986.
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With cool ball physics and quirky trackball controller, Atari had a hit on their hands with the arcade version of Marble Madness. As with all good coin-ops, the legion of home conversions would soon follow, and follow they did.
The objective of the game is to guide your marble through a series of obstacle courses, each viewed from an isometric perspective. The biggest challenge the layer has to overcome is dealing with the ball physics and inertia that will see their marble plunge over cliffs and pits on a regular basis should they not be careful. This is truly a game of skill and finesse where the player's abilities are put to the test under an extremely tight time limit; fail to reach the end of the course before the timer reaches zero and the game is over.
It's worth noting that your performance on each stage determines how many seconds get added to the timer on the next level. Play poorly across a series of levels and you simply won't have enough time to beat the next one.
Will Harvey should be commended for recreating the inertia-based control scheme on the C64, as well as capturing the overall look and feel of the original; it's obvious that he put a lot of time and effort into this.
That said, there a number of problems in this version that really detract from the overall experience. First and foremost, the boundaries of the platforms are far narrower than the graphics would suggest. You'll constantly find your marble rolling over the edge of a platform even though it looked as though you were nowhere near the edge.
Secondly, the point at which the camera scrolls to reveal more of the playfield relative to the marble's position is far too small. Many of the maps require you to roll down a hill or slope and you'll find the marble disappears off the screen and you'll have fallen over the edge or into a trap before the camera catches up. The game's controls are fiendish enough as it is without being unable to see where you're going as well.
The C64 includes the same music tracks as the arcade version, but they sound quite addled. As the comedian Eric Morecambe once said, "I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order" - the audio in the C64 version of Marble Madness echoes this sentiment entirely!
These various problems amount to what feels like death from a thousand cuts and the game really just fails to be fun to play. The fact that each level requires a separate load simply rubs salt into the wounds.
Although Marble Madness is a classic, the C64 version falls short of the mark. If the game had been a single load then players could probably learn to deal with the quirky perspective, but as it stands, it's likely to cause more frustration than anything else.
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