This movie:
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Abuses programming errors
Smart Ball is a neat little action game about a boy and his blob... err, actually it's about a boy who gets turned into a blob, and goes through a bunch of crazy levels to reclaim his true form. I'm not really clear on the story, since their idea of translating it was to delete it entirely. But for some reason, this game reminds me of Super Mario Bros 2, especially the level design and the overall weirdness. Just look at the character lineup: the main character is a glowing blue blob, enemies consist of lots of mice, lunar rabbits, a naked guy with a torch, hopping mini-pigs, a chubby green penguin, various crazed birds, etc.
Jerry the blob can run, jump, stretch up, squish down, and stick to surfaces. He can also engulf and use various items: regular balls for throwing, re-usable but heavy iron balls, a beanstalk seed, and a high-jump powerup. I ended up using every item at least once in this run. I also used what I assume to be a programming error to allow me to gain extra height+distance when jumping if I try to stretch at the right frame during the jump, and another that lets me turn around from a midair running jump without losing speed,
Stretching and squishing damages enemies, but the animation takes longer than the attack can take, so a lot of times it looks like enemies just die when they touch me when I'm really attacking them without any animation having time to show up.
Other notes:
- The bony-fish boss in the jungle level only takes 4 hits to kill, which I inflict immediately, but it takes a really long time to die which is why I jump around for a while and pick up/throw a ball afterward, just to kill time while it dies.
- There is no way to jump while attached to a wall, the only movement you can do is to either slowly crawl up or to drop down.
- When I hit the lava in the desert level and catch onto a wall... that's almost impossible, I mean it's exactly 1 frame away from impossibility, because if you hit the wall even 1 pixel lower than that it won't let you stick on it. (It saved about 60 frames.)
- Moving is the same speed whether on the ground or in the air. The angle of the ground doesn't even matter at all.
- On the moon level, the run button stops working, but it still makes me glow blue, so I use it to glow in time to the music.
- Some of the music in this game is unexpectedly great. I especially like the music of the underwater level.
Emulator used: "Snes9x 1.43 improvement 3" found here:
Forum/Topics/1816
you can also play it back with Snes9x 1.43 WIP.
Emulator settings: WIP1 timing ON, left+right OFF, Volume Height Envelope Reading OFF, Fake Mute OFF, Sync samples with sound CPU ON.
About the description of the movie: To describe the movie, I would just describe the game, somewhat like I have above.
