B - Ballistix

Developer: Reflections / Psygnosis

Release Date: 1992

Alias: Pong...  WITH DEMONS!!!, Crossfire... The Video Game.
Game Type: Future Sports / Arcade

Cue creepy demon / alienlike voice "Let the game... commence."

Just look at that incredibly rad box art up above... look at it, take it in.  It's really gnarly stuff and if it looks familiar, thats because you've most likely seen it before.  Turns out that cover image was designed by Melvyn Grant and was originally used for the 1981 novel The Steel Tsar and eventually the 1987 reissue of the Judas Priest album Rocka Rolla.  Re-usage and unoriginality issues aside, damn it looks cool and I would have bought this game back in '92 based on the cover art alone.  What a mistake that would have been.  Ahhhh... Psygnosis.  They had some of the coolest (and most misleading) box art in the history of video games in the 80s and 90s.  Crazy stuff, do yourself a favor and google "psygnosis box art" if you're unfamiliar with their amazingly rad art style which usually entailed crazy looking demons and such.  It turns out that Psygnosis and Reflections co-developed Ballistix for the TG16.  Yeah, THAT Reflections.. oh come on, you know them.  The guys behind the nifty Shadow of the Beast series, Driver, and as it turns out... upcoming titles such as Far Cry 3 and the 2012 E3 stunner, Watch Dogs (both being co-developed with Ubisoft Montreal).  Apparently there were lots of drugs done in the early 90s when developing Ballistix, or all of that grunge and plaid went straight to the developers heads.  Ballistix is a strange game which has an even stranger idea of control.  Lets get on with it shall we?  Lets get this over with...

Balls everywhere

Essentially, Ballistix boils down to a digital version of shuffleboard, I mean pong, wait... actually its alot closer to that board game from the 80s called Crossfire.  The more I think about it, this game is JUST LIKE Crossfire, except instead of firing marbles from a stationary gun on one end of the board, you can move around while you do it.  The marbles that you fire serve to move the puck around the board itself and eventually (hopefully) into your opponents goal.  Sounds kind of fun in theory and pretty straight forward, but for for some reason it's much more chaotic and ridiculously clumsy than it should be.  I found myself accidentally directing the puck into my own goal... behind my character (or ship, not sure what the player is supposed to be) on far too many occasions.  It's mainly just a button mashing extravaganza of asshatery that leads to a screen filled with balls.  Or as I like to call it,  Ballistichaos (tm).

Hello... is it me your lookin for...

On the plus side of things, there are over 100 courts to play on, and they change after you or your opponent score three goals.  So Ballistix does have some serious diversity going for it.  You can actually play with another player if you feel so inclined, or against the CPU, or even by yourself on a lonely court and wallow in your utter loneliness.  Well, just you and the creepy demon guy and skeleton hand puck dropper, how romantic.  Of course the CPU is about as smart as the lamp sitting here on my desk so playing against the computer really isn't too much fun.  It just roams around the board essentially mirroring your actions and besides, trust me when I say that you'll be your own worst enemy and much more of a threat to yourself than that pesky CPU player.

I'll just put this here... 

The music... is now stuck in my head, and I hate it.  It seems to me that there is only one piece of music in this entire game that starts when the Psygnosis logo pops up and is unrelenting until you turn the damn game off.  There is some digitized speech (well one line of dialogue which is represented at the start of this rant) and cheering to be heard, but other than that the sound design just basically gets the job done.  I really shouldn't be too hard on the sound in these games as they were doing the best they could with what they had to work with at the time.



It seems this game scored in and around the 70% area when reviewed after it came out.  I'd say those scores are fairly accurate, if not a little generous.  Immediately after I started to play Ballistix, I honestly couldn't wait to move on to the next game in this series...and leave this bizarro version of pong...

Digitized version of Crossfire...

Whatever... in the digital dust.

Here's the obligatory gameplay video

And for those of you who are tragically unfamiliar with Crossfire (let alone its amazing commercial), feast your eyes on this.. "it's the ultimate challenge":

If you still want a copy of Pong, Crossfire, Ballistix...   CLICK HERE to search for it on ebay.