Mezase Senkyuoh
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(Battle Balls) Possibly one of the best games you've never played, Mezase Senkyuoh (known as Battle Balls in English) is a very little-known game from the shooter masters who brought us Raiden, Seibu Kaihatsu. It received almost no publicity and was more or less completely ignored outside of Japan. Very few copies were produced inside Japan, and you can easily go weeks or months without seeing a copy come up for sale online or off. The basic gameplay is instantly recognizable: Coloured things fall, and you match 'em up. Easy. Match up four or more of the same colour and they disappear. If the remaining balls fall into a position where four or more of the same colour match up, you get a combo, and combos are used to smite thine enemies. While it sounds like the same puzzle game you've played before, it's really unique, and this is where the spherical dynamics kick in. The triplets are not glued together once they land, the balls tumble down the pile, and it takes a few plays to get used to how they roll, and plan your moves accordingly. The usual game types are here: 2 Player VS, 1P vs CPU, and 1P solo. The graphics are just slightly beyond functional, with character animations and poses in the background, flashy dissolve sequences, and pretty backgrounds. The music is, to put it mildly, f**king exceptional. Few games can claim to have music as suitable as this; Taito's Puzzle Bobble (Bust a Move) might be better, but no others come immediately to mind. Released only for the Playstation and Seibu's own SPI arcade system, the game is incredibly rare. It still doesn't have much recognition or demand, which is distressing. No one I've introduced the game to fails to adore it and covet their own copy. No one who has one will part with it. There was a demo of this on the Raiden DX release for Playstation. It's a whole lot easier to find than this game, and Raiden DX is totally awesome in its own right. This game is simply exceptional. There's nothing about it that isn't absolutely perfect. It presents a novel twist to the puzzle-game genre, with some very polished dynamics and presentation. It's an absolute shame this game wasn't more well known.  |
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