Marble Blast Gold

I don't know man, you try reviewing your favourite game of all time that nobody you know has even heard of.

A preliminary disclaimer: even after eleven years of playing Marble Blast Gold, I am still utter shit at it. I think I hit some kind of personal skill ceiling when I was like 14 and have never improved at it since. I still couldn't pass 75% of the game's Advanced levels even if I tried (not to mention all of the custom levels...). Viewed objectively, I am probably the least qualified person to talk about this game. On the other hand, this is my favourite fucking game of all time. If there's anything I am rating 5/5 here, it's this. Which says something, I suppose.

Marble Blast Gold was a cheap little game from 2001 that you may know if you have ever owned a mid-2000s Apple iBook, as I did - and that you have certainly never heard of otherwise, for reasons I'll discuss later. You're a marble. You roll around stylish cartoony levels to get to the finish line. You use powerups and collect gems. All that nice stuff.

What you haven't learned from that barebones analysis is how stunningly good the marble's physics-based controls are: it carries real weight and momentum, and while it takes the simplest press of the W key to roll, you get the sense that you can take it in any direction you want. It carries one of the most extreme and satisfying proofs of Bushnell's Law in any game I've played — and even in the Advanced levels, as the game pulls out all the stops, you begin to wonder if you've even seen the full extent of your marble's potential. (Which, in fact, you haven't, as numerous amazing speedruns of the game on YouTube will show you.)

The progression across the game's 100 levels is curved to a near-perfect degree. The Beginner Levels are no more than an extended tutorial — maybe too little for 24 whole levels, but it gives you the exact preparation needed for tackling the more robust Intermediate levels, where individual techniques are combined and stretched further. Once the game knows you've gotten a definite hang of things, it then says, 'Alright, well, have fun out there.' The Advanced levels are ridiculous. It's here that the game's cartoony creativity really shines, and it makes up for its spike in difficulty by being an absolute thrill ride, through moving platform gauntlets and labyrinthine castles and giant pinball machines. It feels like the 'real' Marble Blast Gold in many ways — but I also respect the amount of prep work the game gives you beforehand, making sure you're prepared for this sudden onslaught of Fun. (I should probably reiterate that I am still terrible at most of these, but it's a testament to MBG's design that I still have a whale of a time as I OOB constantly.)

So that's Marble Blast Gold. It's fun as all hell, and the most polished and rewarding 3D physics platformer I think I'll ever play. But my reasons for it being my favourite game of all time do stretch somewhat beyond its bounds. You may notice, looking around, that you cannot buy Marble Blast Gold anywhere — and I mean anywhere. In 2011 the rights to it were sold to a holding company that immediately removed it from availability. If it weren't for the game's community keeping a mirror of the download on their unofficial website, MBG would have been scraped from existence.

This is the part of the review where I veer completely off track and talk about the most underappreciated video game modding community I've ever known. At this point Marble Blast Gold is only my third favourite Marble Blast game, which is an impressive statistic for a franchise with a grand total of 1 official title. (Xbox 360 ports notwithstanding.) What MBG's modding community has done to this game is nothing short of miraculous. It's not often when you see the term 'modification' used to refer to making basically an Entire New Fucking Game. They've gone from making simple custom stages using MBG's barebones level editor to handcrafting hundreds of levels with professional software, utilising newly-discovered tricks and techniques in their design, replacing every single art asset, adding entirely new features, and turning the entire game upside down.

Comparing Marble Blast Gold to its most recent modification, PlatinumQuest, is like comparing two utterly different games. There are entire new mechanics and user interfaces that I never thought possible to create when you don't even have access to the game's source code: new level types, cannons of different varieties, real-time level previews, even water. Let's not even get into the fact that the PQ dev team created a fully functional multiplayer mode from scratch. (You heard me.) It's odd that I've never seen them mentioned anywhere in more prestigious modding circles, and I hope they eventually get the recognition they've deserved for over a decade now.

Unfortunately, no sane person would ever count modifications of their all-time favourite game as their 'actual' all-time favourite game, never mind including them in the Glitchwave database — so I have to settle for gushing endlessly about them in a review. Fortunately, PQ also includes the original game's levels untouched, and I recommend starting with them first; later community-made levels throw all sorts of difficult techniques into the mix.

Still, all of this does say something good about the game that inspired it — and one could argue that the best games are the ones with the most long-lasting communities. For a game made seventeen years ago, Marble Blast Gold feels timeless even today. I'll probably still be playing MBG ten years from now. I'll probably still be utter shit at it. And I'll probably still love every single second.