Roball – Conso's Video Games Perspectives

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Internet Archive link:
https://archive.org/details/roball_202104
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There’s a game that I remember playing in the past, but I haven’t seen a lot of footage around on the internet. So here is where I step in. Introducing Roball.

Its first incarnation I ever saw was the 2.1 shareware version, originally from a floppy disk that I think was distributed together with the magazine “PC Subito”.

So, what is Roball? It’s an arcade game where you have to steer a ball around a track, here called just “Rack” and reach the white square that marks the end before the timer at the top expires and without falling off the boundaries. You can also place two extra tiles to help you, if there’s space for them, a friction plate that slows the roball down and a springboard that lets the roball jump over obstacles.

The thing that took me the most time to adapt to is how the ball is controlled. In similar games pressing the buttons would make the ball start moving and then it would slow down by itself because of friction, here the ball keeps moving on its own, so you are constantly controlling its speed by accelerating in all directions almost as if it had thrusters.

Together with the game there’s also packaged a level editor that lets you edit the game’s levels or create brand new ones with the possibility to easily swap them around to create an entire new set of levels. The tile based system also allows for some non euclidean levels, which is nice, and by looking through the levels there’s some that are definitively abstract, in the hypotesis they were meant to be playable in first place.

I would say that’s all for Roball, but while looking around on the internet I found another version of the game, that according to the files inside is version 2.0 of the game.

The first big difference is that unlike 2.1 that has support for EGA, CGA and VGA, 2.0 only supports EGA and CGA. The stage and stage order are different, the ball is harder to see, and there’s this thing that I can’t just figure out: when you begin the game the timer counts down extremely fast and it can drain all your lives, unless you immediately press a button to move. It seems to be related to standing still. Odd. Also the PC speaker sounds are way, way worse.

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