Marble Madness

The Good
One of the best coin-op conversions of its era. Launched in 1985, the Amiga brought a new era in graphics capability to home computers, and Marble Madness really took advantage.

The Bad
Pretty short, to play it start-to-finish.

The Bottom Line
Guide your marble through a series of 3D isometric challenges.

The Good
The game is to guide a marble through 6 courses. Each harder then the last. The game is a challenge because of the time. You start with 60 seconds. On the next course, you have the remaining time from the last course plus 30 seconds. But starting at course 5, you'll get only 20 seconds powerup.

The Bad
The game is HARD at first but eventually you will beat it if you practice. My best time is 17 seconds left.

The Bottom Line
A true action/strategy classic for all.

The Good
It's good to have people like Mr. Gabel around for rebuttals--it brings out more information about the game. :-)

Considering the capabilities of the common PC in 1986, Marble Madness was an exquisite conversion that clearly took a lot of work. Even on a 4.77MHz machine, the nearly full-screen graphics move at an acceptable clip. The graphics, albeit lacking in color to the original arcade game, are faithful to the original.

What Mr. Gabel doesn't know is that if you played Marble Madness on a Tandy or PCjr, you were treated to 16-color graphics and 3-voice music that was a huge improvement over the regular PC version with just 4-color graphics and single-voice sound. If he had ever played this version, he might have made his review a bit less harsh. Comparing PC conversions to Amiga conversions isn't really fair; conversions should be compared to what they're ported from instead.

The Bad
Playing with a joystick was effective, but it just felt... wrong. The original arcade game was not only controlled with a trakball, it was designed for one.

The keyboard controls were terrible. I'm sure they did the best they could, but there's no real way to simulate analog direction and speed control with a digital input device.

The Bottom Line
If you have a Tandy/PCjr and a joystick, Marble Madness is a joy to play.