Spherical fun

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Balls is an interesting venture by a group of lower sixth form students from Queen Elizabeth's Hospital School in Bristol. As part of the Young Enterprise Scheme they have taken the rather bold step of writing a game and launching it into the notoriously cut-throat market.

Yes Marketing raised the capital for the project through the sale of shares. The shareholders were no doubt attracted by the thought of a sizeable divident dropping through the letterbox when the game hits number one.

I must admit that when I received the game and read the accompanying letter I cringed in anticipation of what was to come. A bunch of pimply-faced youths had probably knocked together a half-baked game written in BASIC as a way of skiving their way through a year of economics. Within seconds of booting the disc I realised that I couldn't have been more wrong.

With the title splashed across the screen in huge letters and a tuneful ditty accompanying it, a smooth horizontal scrolling routine began displaying the story line. I suspect that only those players with much patience and strong stomachs will see the complete message - I find that reading long horizontally scrolling messages induces a feeling of nausea.

Risking the loss of my evening meal I courageously sat through the entire message, the gist of which is as follows. In the year 2168 all of the mundane jobs were performed by robots, this inevitably led to much boredom and unrest amongst the inhabitants of Earth.

In an effort to relieve this boredom, the governments of the planet gt together and built a large enegy grid in space. By charging different squares with different types of energy, they could be given various properties. Purple ones causes the contestant's vehicle to bounce, white ones increase its speed, yellow ones stop it and black ones - gaps - are fatal.

The two brave contestants were strapped into their spheres and launched into the grid, the first to reach the far side - without dying - was the winner. As the number of fatalities increased, the number of volunteers decreases in proportion. To encourage new contestants the organisers increased the prize money and while this boosted the number but it also resulted in much cheating and a further escalation of the death rate until, inevitably, the game was banned.

Reading between the lines you have probably already guessed the game's format. As a pilot of one of the game spheres, you must guide the craft along a moving highway of coloured rectangles as they scroll towards you at high speed. By clever planning you can use the properties of the different colours to enable you to leap otherwise impassable gaps in the grid.

Since there are very few original games any more, I delved through my collection of discs and dug out Gary Partis' Sphere Of Destiny - a very similar, bounce the ball down the astral highway type of game. I had remembered this as fast - Sphere really flies along in comparison to Balls! But on the minus side, the ball in Sphere Of Destiny is very two dimensional, whereas the same motion in Balls is far more realistic - I much prefer the Yes game.

Another, quite major achievement, is the inclusion of a two-player option. I am not referring to ayou go, then I go, then you go, and so on feature, but a fully fledged simultaneous two-players-at-the-same-time action type of option. By dividing the screen horizontally, the programmers have displayed each player's view one above the other - not bad for a bunch of school kids.

Balls is not an easy game to play. I had to tackle each level half a dozen times before I had figured out the right combination of the rights and lefts to reach th far side of the grid. But even when you know the correct route to follow, your timing has to be immaculate.

Lose one of your four balls and you are returned to the start of the current level - this can become incredibly frustrating - but since each grid is relatively small there was probably no alternative. The only concession to easing the player's frustration is the "Start Level" facility. On the options screen you are offered the opportunity to specify the level on which you wish to start the next game - but only if you have already got that far during the current playing session.

Balls is a game that deserves to do well. If Yes Marketing can put the same degree of professionalism into marketing the game as they have into programming it then their shareholders could be in for a handsome reward.

Jon Revis