#playmark

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Power Balls, arcade.

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At the big VGJunk site today: Balls! Powerful Balls! Also frustration, tedium and a urinating dog in Playmark's 1994 arcade game Power Balls! If you want to see a tiny hat and dangerous lunatics getting in over their head, gang warfare-wise, then read all about it here!

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After briefly touching on Hard Times, the Blood Bros. rip-off, I didn't expect to see anything else out of developer Playmark so soon. Yet here we are with Power Balls, a side-view Breakout/Arkanoid style game with an urban New York theme. Oh, yes, you heard that right, but it gets better. Instead of some arbitrary disembodied paddle that magically floats around deflecting balls, you play instead as one of five gang members, armed with bats, who demolish neighborhoods by slugging baseballs into them. The game makes it seem like these are the turfs of rival gangs, but unless New York gangs are known for being meticulously neat, these are normal neighborhoods that you're smashing up like a common vandal.

Most of the game's six districts follows a pattern: Four stages of destroying the envionment, and a fifth stage culminating in a boss fight (supposedly against the leader of a rival gang), who usually shoots at you. With guns. They say don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Imagine what they would say about bringing a bat. There's a very limited time gun power-up in each of the boss stages that gives you a little more firepower, but ultimately doesn't accomplish much, since these guys take thirty or more shots to bring down. After you defeat the boss, there's a bonus stage where you trash an empty subway car for points. So brave. So noble.

While the game's environment is certainly interesting (in sometimes horribly stereotypical or racist ways), the gameplay just falls flat, which is a shame because I was really excited for this strange take on the block-ball genre. There are different stats provided for each playable character, but they all generally feel the same, and apart from the singular gun icon in each boss stage, there are no power-ups or items to add anything to your repetoire of moves, which is basically hit and hit a little harder, every once in a while making a dive so you can deliver... A hit. Each stage is timed at four minutes, and many of them, especially the boss stages, feel nearly impossible to beat in that time (I failed that several times.) The final stage is ridiculous and expects you to not only take out four armored turrets, but two bosses in the time limit--all the while dodging enemy fire and keeping your ball on the field, mind you. Graphically, this has style but feels like something that should have been out a few years earlier. The main game has one musical track which has a nice funk to it, but it gets old quickly when you're facing 30+ levels.

As a horizontally-aligned paddle game (especially in arcades), Power Balls is an uncommon experience and it's not a bad game (despite what the title art would have you think) but it's certainly a bland and frustrating one.