Airball

The Good
Ed Scio's graphics are the best Dragon users ever got. The sound is pretty impressive, although by 1987 there were a lot of games with excellent sound as people learnt how to produce music that sounded as if it were multi channel. The game is hard, and frankly rather frustrating, but that is the nature of the genre, really. A glorious game at the end of the 8 bit era.

The Bad
This game is hard, and I seem to recall the Trs-80/Dragon version cannot be completed with a Joystick- only the keyboard- which incidentally gives a much better gameplay experience anyway. There are some cheats out there for it- check back issues of Dragon User, which have been fully archived online. I would have liked to have seen the game in green/black, which would have been an option in the hi-res PAL Dragon mode, although I am grateful that neither full colour green or buff were options as these would have spoilt the magnificent graphics.

The Bottom Line
Ed Scio's masterpiece for the Dragon, so good it got converted to 16 bit. This was one of maybe three games I felt comfortable showing to Amiga owners.

The Good
It has a nice VGA graphics, equal with the Atari ST and Amiga versions, which is outstanding for a DOS game from 1987. It has a mystical, magical atmosphere set in an enchanted, dark castle full of creepy statues and traps. The playfield is enormous, it has so many rooms, that makes it is a bit even scary, as it made me think there could be anything in the next room (as a kid). You are an air filled ball here that leaks slowly and you have to find air pumps to survive, these serve also as checkpoints. Without knowing the story, or the objective of the game (which is picking up certain objects and and bringing them to the starting point), I had no idea what to do and I didn't got too far. Maybe I'm lucky I didn't. I saw a full review on Youtube, and I can mostly confirm the issues mentioned by it.

The Bad
The sound effects are okay, but where is the music? There is the composer listed in the credits (or is he responsible just for the other ports of the game?), and there are some assuming .MUS files in the game's directory, but I cannot get music even in GameBlaster mode. (If you know something, please drop a comment into the "How to make the music work?" topic in the forums.) But this is the least problem this game has.

The perspective is isometric, this makes the gameplay 3D-like, but this also makes impossible to see and understand, which platform can we jump on and which platform is out of reach. And this makes really impossible situations sometimes.

The collision detection simply is out of control. We can jump on some spikes without any trouble, some others kill from far away. Add the confusing isometric view and you get chaos! There are even deadly floor tiles.

There are no specific keys to go diagonally, but we need a lot to go diagonally. No, we need to use combinations of the four direction keys to make the ball roll diagonally. This is very dangerous where hazards surround our path. Some places need really, I mean REALLY precise aiming, which are hard to set up, and the ball rolls too fast also.

The ball pops instantly from falls (what?), spikes, deadly floors, and overpressure. We have strictly 3 lives and no way to get bonus lives. Instead, there are useless crystals that appear randomly and we can collect them for useless points. Then we can qualify for the useless high score table.

The level design is stupid at some places. There are traps, that kill instantly, traps where we get stuck, checkpoints that are unreachable, and some places, where impossible to go just in general.

All these make the game unwinnable. Right before we could reach the last screen (screens?) there is a block with spikes on it's sides and a flat top. We have to jump on the top of it to get past. When the ball gets any near to this block from any direction, including from up, just pops. Didn't anyone test this game before they released it? I saw a video where in the Amiga version someone gets through these without any problems, and wins the game, but in DOS, it is impossible. (If although anyone did, please drop a comment into the "Has anyone ever finished this game?" forum topic.)

The Bottom Line
I still want to give it a go, but only with the infinite lives cheat, and It still will be difficult.

The Good
Most people find themselves playing Airball without realizing they're doing it. It sounds intriguing--you need to find objects to turn yourself back into a human--so you give it a quick go. An hour later, you're amazed at the diverse structure of the rooms and the beautiful graphics. Two hours later, and you're still playing.

The graphics are beautiful, originally rendered in 32 colors on the Amiga and translated nicely to the PC. The tiles used to make up the rooms and the maps are diverse enough to give the illusion of a large castle with many rooms.

The Bad
Airball's CGA support is weak. It's weak in a good way in that some of the darker rooms are completely visible without the torch, since CGA has no palette (so there's no way for the program to dim the screen). It's weak in a bad way, however, in that some objects are almost completely invisible because the 4 colors everything uses unintentionally mask an object lying against a similarly-colored background. Unless you know exactly what to look for, Airball is extremely difficult to finish in CGA.

The Bottom Line
Airball is something you try out for a couple of minutes to see what the rooms look like, and find yourself still playing 45 minutes later.