Sometimes a game's reputation proceeds it, for better or for worst. And today, we are going to focus on the "worse."
I have heard quite a bit about Ballz 3D, a fighting game released for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis late in the lifecycle of both systems. As we all well know at this point, that can be really good, or really bad. A lot of games released late in a system's lifecycle take full advantage of hardware that developers have had quite a bit of time to figure out. On the other, the end of a console's lifecycle is prime territory for developers dumping half baked, low effort titles onto a console just to say they did. That was especially true of fighting games, which were all the rage at the beginning of the 4th generation but starting to lose favor by the end of it. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Fatal Fury had established the right way to do these games and the days of just slapping a license on top of a random tournament fighter and having it sell well were nearly over. I guess Ballz wasn't that late in the generation, but it was definitely later.
As such, I tried to give the much maligned Ballz 3D the benefit of the doubt. The internet age has made it fashionable to be hateful and spiteful to video games, all in the interest of generating more clicks. As such, a lot of games have a bad reputation that they simply didn't earn. I mean, a lot of these titles can't be that bad. Ballz even got decent reviews from major publications back in the day, something I was especially surprised to find. I've looked at some lousy games before, but with a few exceptions, most of what I've reviewed over the last few years has been at least tolerable. Just because the internet has spent the last 20 years dunking on a game doesn't mean it's automatically bad. It's actually another poorly remembered fighting game, Shaq Fu, that I always bring up as an example here. I'm not going to say Shaq Fu is good, but it's not horrible, there's some fun in playing it, even if it's just to say you did. So maybe it's the same for Ballz?
Ya, no. Simply put, this is one of the worst games I have ever played, it's a broken, miserable, borderline offensive mess that epitomizes the worst aspects of the industry from the 90's. Look, I very much prefer old games over new ones. But there are definitely things that are better about the industry now. Chief among those is the level of quality control that games undergo nowadays. I've always maintained that while modern games have a lower ceiling, largely due to lack of willingness to take risks or innovate, they tend to have a much higher floor due to more professional testing. Because there is absolutely no way anyone tested this before it was released. There isn't a single redeeming quallity here, I guess you could give credit for the early attempt at 3D visuals on a 4th gen console, but that's about it.
While said visuals may have been impressive from a technical standpoint, they don't actually look all that good. As the name would suggest, the characters are all made of floating 3D balls, that's with an s because I've had enough of the forced 90's edginess, which leads to them all looking like disjointed messes. One of them is a clown, that's the only one I can figure out definitively, I think one is a cave man or something and I couldn't really figure out the rest. I had to look them up, turns out one of them is a monkey. Go figure. If this didn't impact the gameplay, it could be something I overlooked. But it also made it damn near impossible to determine when I was hitting my opponents or when I was going to get hit. Nor could I figure out what most of my special moves were or what they were trying to accomplish. In a fighting game, that's sort of a problem. I've played some lousy ones in my day, but I don't know if I've ever played a 1 on 1 fighter that was this visually disjointed and confusing.
And the sound, oh lord is it horrible. This is one of those situations where I knew I was doomed from the start, to the point that I muted the game pretty much immediately. The aforementioned forced edginess hits you right away with a five second loop of a lousy, overly compressed, reject hip hop beat. This beat is also accompanied by a random woman moaning in such a way that, well, you know what I mean. Just completely unnecessary, and the sound doesn't get any better as the game continues.
I don't have the instruction manual, but research indicates that it's full of the same kind of thing. Countless, relentless puns about the name of the game, "you gotta have ballz" and stuff like that. Honestly, that would have worked, like, once or twice in a print ad or commercial or something. But this game just beats you over the head with it again, and again, and again. Each arena, those look awful too by the way, has a large jumbo-tron style screen in the background that constantly displays random smack talk as you battle. Most of these are typical, generic BS like "nibble some knuckle" or "lick the mat chump" or various other kinds of phrases that old Japanese men thought American kids thought were cool in 1994. I do have to give them credit though, some of these did actually make me laugh, whether intentionally or not. Not going to lie, I almost spit out my beer and had to pause the game the first time I saw "open wide for chunky!" come up. When you defeat the character Yoko, the one that I think is a monkey, the board will display the message "Yoko! Oh no!" which was about as legitimately clever as the game got. If it wasn't that, it was the constant prompting to "taunt the ostrich," which seemed incrediby random but was actually a gameplay hint for one of the boss battles. Of course, you would have to be able to discern that said boss was an ostrich, but this was a surprising amount of thought put in to a game that was otherwise completely brainless.
All of this would have been forgiven if the gameplay was any good. But it isn't. At all. As mentioned, the nature of the graphics made it incredibly difficult to determine where enemy hitboxes were or which frames on your attacks were active. That's a recepie for a lousy fighting game, or at the very least an unfair one. The animation on grabs is so spotty and odd looking that I actually thought my game was slowing down the first few times it happened. The control is incredibly delayed, it takes forever for your characters to do anything and the movenment, whether it's in 2D or 3D is stiff and slow.
Usually, that makes for a very difficult fighting game. But that wasn't the case here. I'm not sure if this is actually a positive, but I guess it's fair in the sense that Ballz is as broken and unfair to the computer as it is to the player. Usually, games of this "quality" feel cheap and hopeless, as your AI opponents relentlessly beat you down while you struggle with horrid controls and unituitive movement. But in Ballz, the computer is just as lost as you are, plodding around the arena while never seeming to be able to effectively defend against your attacks. After I lost the first two rounds, I decided to try out some special moves from some of the characters. I discovered that one of them, I don't remember which one, had a fairly effective attack that was performed with a quarter circle/hadouken motion. So I decided to start using that. And I started using it over, and over and over. I actually did a playthrough where that was literally all I did, like, literally all I did. No blocking, no jumping, not even trying to walk forward. Just quartercircle forward and punch. And you know what? I got to the boss of the game without losing a round. It would have been funny if it wasn't so sad.
I really don't want to talk about this game anymore and frankly, there isn't very much else to say. Ballz is about as appropriate a way to describe this title as you could get. Look, I very much love that older video games were willing to expiriment in ways that modern titles just weren't. Again, I always maintain that's why these kinds of games have a higher ceiling. But even I recognize that a lot of times those expiriments didn't work, and Ballz 3D is definitely one that did not work. Forced 90's edginess, confusing graphics, bad gameplay, it's got all the hallmarks of one of the worst games of all time.
But how far down on the list ist it? I've covered a lot more good games than bad, but a far as truly terrible games this is in the bottom three. I do believe I gave Rise of the Robots the second lowest score of all time and that seems a fair comparison, what with them being fighting games that were failed expiriments and all. Which is worse? Well, on one hand Ballz actually had characters with special moves. But on the other ROTR looked better, played better and didn't have a soundtrack that sounded like it sampled parts of an adult film. So I think it's actually going to rank ahead of Ballz. And now we have one more trash heap to clear: will Ballz join the coveted zero club? It's rarified air, and I've actually given out more 10s (two, though both were retroactive) than zeros over the years. So let's stop dancing around it. Is Ballz worse than the Squirrel and Moose? Honestly, no. It's going to get points for being expirimental, trying new tech and unironically including the phrase "open wide for chunky." But not very many. Ballz 3D is one of the worst games I've ever played, I don't understand how this reviewed well and you should avoid it like the plague.
0.25/10
I have heard quite a bit about Ballz 3D, a fighting game released for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis late in the lifecycle of both systems. As we all well know at this point, that can be really good, or really bad. A lot of games released late in a system's lifecycle take full advantage of hardware that developers have had quite a bit of time to figure out. On the other, the end of a console's lifecycle is prime territory for developers dumping half baked, low effort titles onto a console just to say they did. That was especially true of fighting games, which were all the rage at the beginning of the 4th generation but starting to lose favor by the end of it. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Fatal Fury had established the right way to do these games and the days of just slapping a license on top of a random tournament fighter and having it sell well were nearly over. I guess Ballz wasn't that late in the generation, but it was definitely later.
As such, I tried to give the much maligned Ballz 3D the benefit of the doubt. The internet age has made it fashionable to be hateful and spiteful to video games, all in the interest of generating more clicks. As such, a lot of games have a bad reputation that they simply didn't earn. I mean, a lot of these titles can't be that bad. Ballz even got decent reviews from major publications back in the day, something I was especially surprised to find. I've looked at some lousy games before, but with a few exceptions, most of what I've reviewed over the last few years has been at least tolerable. Just because the internet has spent the last 20 years dunking on a game doesn't mean it's automatically bad. It's actually another poorly remembered fighting game, Shaq Fu, that I always bring up as an example here. I'm not going to say Shaq Fu is good, but it's not horrible, there's some fun in playing it, even if it's just to say you did. So maybe it's the same for Ballz?
Ya, no. Simply put, this is one of the worst games I have ever played, it's a broken, miserable, borderline offensive mess that epitomizes the worst aspects of the industry from the 90's. Look, I very much prefer old games over new ones. But there are definitely things that are better about the industry now. Chief among those is the level of quality control that games undergo nowadays. I've always maintained that while modern games have a lower ceiling, largely due to lack of willingness to take risks or innovate, they tend to have a much higher floor due to more professional testing. Because there is absolutely no way anyone tested this before it was released. There isn't a single redeeming quallity here, I guess you could give credit for the early attempt at 3D visuals on a 4th gen console, but that's about it.
While said visuals may have been impressive from a technical standpoint, they don't actually look all that good. As the name would suggest, the characters are all made of floating 3D balls, that's with an s because I've had enough of the forced 90's edginess, which leads to them all looking like disjointed messes. One of them is a clown, that's the only one I can figure out definitively, I think one is a cave man or something and I couldn't really figure out the rest. I had to look them up, turns out one of them is a monkey. Go figure. If this didn't impact the gameplay, it could be something I overlooked. But it also made it damn near impossible to determine when I was hitting my opponents or when I was going to get hit. Nor could I figure out what most of my special moves were or what they were trying to accomplish. In a fighting game, that's sort of a problem. I've played some lousy ones in my day, but I don't know if I've ever played a 1 on 1 fighter that was this visually disjointed and confusing.
And the sound, oh lord is it horrible. This is one of those situations where I knew I was doomed from the start, to the point that I muted the game pretty much immediately. The aforementioned forced edginess hits you right away with a five second loop of a lousy, overly compressed, reject hip hop beat. This beat is also accompanied by a random woman moaning in such a way that, well, you know what I mean. Just completely unnecessary, and the sound doesn't get any better as the game continues.
I don't have the instruction manual, but research indicates that it's full of the same kind of thing. Countless, relentless puns about the name of the game, "you gotta have ballz" and stuff like that. Honestly, that would have worked, like, once or twice in a print ad or commercial or something. But this game just beats you over the head with it again, and again, and again. Each arena, those look awful too by the way, has a large jumbo-tron style screen in the background that constantly displays random smack talk as you battle. Most of these are typical, generic BS like "nibble some knuckle" or "lick the mat chump" or various other kinds of phrases that old Japanese men thought American kids thought were cool in 1994. I do have to give them credit though, some of these did actually make me laugh, whether intentionally or not. Not going to lie, I almost spit out my beer and had to pause the game the first time I saw "open wide for chunky!" come up. When you defeat the character Yoko, the one that I think is a monkey, the board will display the message "Yoko! Oh no!" which was about as legitimately clever as the game got. If it wasn't that, it was the constant prompting to "taunt the ostrich," which seemed incrediby random but was actually a gameplay hint for one of the boss battles. Of course, you would have to be able to discern that said boss was an ostrich, but this was a surprising amount of thought put in to a game that was otherwise completely brainless.
All of this would have been forgiven if the gameplay was any good. But it isn't. At all. As mentioned, the nature of the graphics made it incredibly difficult to determine where enemy hitboxes were or which frames on your attacks were active. That's a recepie for a lousy fighting game, or at the very least an unfair one. The animation on grabs is so spotty and odd looking that I actually thought my game was slowing down the first few times it happened. The control is incredibly delayed, it takes forever for your characters to do anything and the movenment, whether it's in 2D or 3D is stiff and slow.
Usually, that makes for a very difficult fighting game. But that wasn't the case here. I'm not sure if this is actually a positive, but I guess it's fair in the sense that Ballz is as broken and unfair to the computer as it is to the player. Usually, games of this "quality" feel cheap and hopeless, as your AI opponents relentlessly beat you down while you struggle with horrid controls and unituitive movement. But in Ballz, the computer is just as lost as you are, plodding around the arena while never seeming to be able to effectively defend against your attacks. After I lost the first two rounds, I decided to try out some special moves from some of the characters. I discovered that one of them, I don't remember which one, had a fairly effective attack that was performed with a quarter circle/hadouken motion. So I decided to start using that. And I started using it over, and over and over. I actually did a playthrough where that was literally all I did, like, literally all I did. No blocking, no jumping, not even trying to walk forward. Just quartercircle forward and punch. And you know what? I got to the boss of the game without losing a round. It would have been funny if it wasn't so sad.
I really don't want to talk about this game anymore and frankly, there isn't very much else to say. Ballz is about as appropriate a way to describe this title as you could get. Look, I very much love that older video games were willing to expiriment in ways that modern titles just weren't. Again, I always maintain that's why these kinds of games have a higher ceiling. But even I recognize that a lot of times those expiriments didn't work, and Ballz 3D is definitely one that did not work. Forced 90's edginess, confusing graphics, bad gameplay, it's got all the hallmarks of one of the worst games of all time.
But how far down on the list ist it? I've covered a lot more good games than bad, but a far as truly terrible games this is in the bottom three. I do believe I gave Rise of the Robots the second lowest score of all time and that seems a fair comparison, what with them being fighting games that were failed expiriments and all. Which is worse? Well, on one hand Ballz actually had characters with special moves. But on the other ROTR looked better, played better and didn't have a soundtrack that sounded like it sampled parts of an adult film. So I think it's actually going to rank ahead of Ballz. And now we have one more trash heap to clear: will Ballz join the coveted zero club? It's rarified air, and I've actually given out more 10s (two, though both were retroactive) than zeros over the years. So let's stop dancing around it. Is Ballz worse than the Squirrel and Moose? Honestly, no. It's going to get points for being expirimental, trying new tech and unironically including the phrase "open wide for chunky." But not very many. Ballz 3D is one of the worst games I've ever played, I don't understand how this reviewed well and you should avoid it like the plague.
0.25/10
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