OMGJeremy

Humpday Gaming: Ballz

Need some Ballz?! How about a FART SANDWICH?! Yeah? Well good, because you’re about to get all the fifth grade humor you can handle with today’s vomit-inducing 16-bit shit sandwich: Ballz.

Ballz is basically a tech demo of scaling 2D spheres taken way too far. I can imagine this was somewhat impressive in the 16-bit days, when seeing anything scaled around on screen was enough to make gamers flip out and scream in disbelief, but I have to wonder at what point PF Magic really decided they could make a solid game from just doing that. Not just a solid game, but a solid FIGHTING game at that. Arguably the hardest genre of gaming at the time to make something of any worth, let alone do it off a half-assed tech demo. Also the fact that the fighting game market was so overcrowded at the time that anything that wasn’t Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat instantly got pushed to the clearance bins at Blockbuster.

Now common logic should tell you that maybe this should be put back into the oven to cook for a while, and simply move on to a new idea that isn’t as insane or futile.

Needless to say, several Ballz games would be produced over multiple consoles. Hot damn.

No plz

Ballz is barely a fighting game at all. The “characters” are all nothing more than what you’ve probably tried to do in MS Paint when you were bored, and simply made bunch of circles look like a vaguely human figure. The difference here is that someone was getting paid to do just that. Possibly with real money. The geniuses at PF Magic went all out too, producing characters like a midget with a baseball bat, a zombie (which was just a bunch of green balls), a rhinoceros, a farting monkey, and a clown that humped the air when you jumped.

Let’s hope it wasn’t real money.

Playing Ballz is on par with drawing comics back and forth to your friends in elementary school. Like you would draw a guy saying “FART!!!!” and then you would give it to your friend and he would draw a guy that said “TURDS!!!!!!!” and then you’d both crack up laughing so hard that you’d pee yourself and be sent home. Now imagine playing a game like that. Literally. You press a button and your guy shoves his butt in the other guy’s face while a screen in the background exclaims “YOU GOT BALLZ!!!!” and then the other guy presses a button and produces a fart with the screen in the background showing a picture of a butt farting. Only the end result in Ballz isn’t you peeing yourself in gleeful joy. It’s more of turning the console off and laying quietly in your bed until you force yourself to go to sleep.

Needless to say, the game was broken, and was simply there to play off its humor value more than its game play. Hitting someone was only noticeable if their power bar went down, and moving around the quasi-3D arena was a mess of a chore. Hell, just understanding what’s happening is sometimes far harder than it ever should be. Somehow though,we were supposed to think it was all hilarious simply because everyone would randomly fart or talk about testicles in a manner that wasn’t talking about testicles but really WAS. Please. Make me a game I can play and THEN put the fart jokes in.

Arrooga indeed.

One thing of note before I close this out is that I’m sure you can imagine the game goes out of its way to keep the Ballz double entendres coming in full force, and it certainly did. At every corner you’re reminded that the game’s developers probably simply wanted to make this game just to see how many times they could reference testicles by screaming “YOU GOTTA HAVE BALLZ” all over anything they could get it on. Mainly their print ads in magazines. Nintendo though, wasn’t having that shit. Playing the old grumpy nanny of the 16-bit era, Nintendo somehow had enough of a sense of humor to recognize the referencing being done, and told PF Magic it wasn’t having any of their juvenile humor on their pure Christian console. So PF Magic changed the slogan to “YOU GOTTA PLAY BALLZ” on the SNES version, removing every single reason to ever play this game in one fell swoop. Once again proving that Nintendo can somehow take the fun out of things that barely even try to associate fun with their products in the first place.

So yes, Ballz was a terrible game. I think it was one of the last games of that era that went on the idea that if you played to the lowest common denominator of gamers, that you would somehow produce a game better than the sum of its parts, IE; Boogerman, Ren and Stimpy, Clayfighter, etc. Gamers were growing up, and simply didn’t much care for butts and fart noises anymore. They wanted some adult themes in their games. Because as you may well be aware, when you turn 14, it’s time for some adult fucking shit. The PSX was right around the corner to give just that to gamers, but Ballz was there to at least hammer it home that it was time to move on. We deserved better.

And we didn’t need Balls to figure that out.