#ballblazer

Antic August 1984

Ballblazer (Atari 7800)

Developed/Published by: Lucasfilm Games / Atari Released: 04/1985 Completed: 12/11/2021 Completion: I really want to say I beat Droid 7 here but it beat me in sudden death a few times and I can’t be arsed with it any more! So… I beat six of nine droids. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

I was a bit confused for a minute here trying to remember why I’d placed Lucasfilm Games’ first two titles (this and Rescue on Fractalus) in early 1984 rather than 1985 when they came out, but then I remembered that they were actually finished then and had to sit about forever as Atari collapsed, and I felt it made more sense to actually situate them when they should have came out (and it’s worth noting that for a lot of players they came out in late 1983, as work-in-progress versions were leaked then, meaning some people played these games for nearly two years before they actually came out!)

Anyway to confuse things I decided the best version of Ballblazer to play was the Atari 7800 version, which didn’t come out till 1987, but after seeing the silky smooth visuals on Jeremy Parish’s NES Works it was obviously the one to go for (although I think I read somewhere that the soundtrack isn’t generative the way it was in the original Atari 800 release, which is a shame.)

I’ve really loved structuring which games I play because it’s led to me finally playing and discovering some titles that stand the test of time incredibly and some that were just never good, but I’ve not actually hit many titles where I’ve thought “oh, I can see why this was good at the time, but it doesn’t hold up.”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that this is how I feel about Lucasfilm’s first forays. Ballblazer (for it’s this one that I’m talking about now, you’ll have to hold on for my expose on Rescue on Fractalus) is a really fascinating attempt to make a 3D sports title without putting any form of rotation in the player’s hands. Players move forwards, backwards and strafe in the pursuit of a ball across a checkerboard pitch (court?) and every time they would lose sight of the ball (because it’s behind or to the side of them) the viewpoint shifts in 90 degree increments to keep the player aimed towards it. If they’ve got the ball? It shifts to always be facing their goal.

It’s elegant, in a way. It deals with a technical limitation and a limitation inherent in the available controls, and it makes something that’s really accessible… as long as you’ve read the manual, or someone is explaining it to you.

A bit like with Lords of Midnight, I have this vague memory that I might have played this on Amstrad CPC and not understood it at all, which must have been loads of players experience. Now that I get it, it’s 100% one of those games that you have to be playing against someone else. It’s a stunningly bare-bones release. It barely has a title screen, and while the manual (interestingly) spins that you’ve reached the final match of an intergalactic tournament, all you can do is basically play an exhibition match against another player or AI with nine different levels (you can change the length of a match, too, I guess.)

The game is a lot of fun (for a while) but if you’re on your lonesome, once you reach the higher levels of AI the flaws come tumbling out. Majorly, the game doesn’t really have good defensive play. Once your opponent has the ball, you’re stuck trying to dislodge it from them, and it tends to work out that a tackle from the side will just send the ball bouncing off the wall back to them as you spin wildly backwards, and if you’re tacking from the front it doesn’t really seem to do anything at all.

I think there’s some sort of timing aspect to it, maybe, but even pouring over the manual I never worked it out. It makes playing the game at a higher level a mad scramble to get the ball first, and if you fail, just hoping that you can position yourself in a way that does manage to dislodge the ball or you can get in front of the goal and stay on front of your opponent, which leads to a weird sort of stalemate.

And as elegant as the automatic direction switching is… it always manages to be at its most disorientating when it matters the most.

My suspicion is that these things don’t matter that much if you’re playing against another player, but to be honest I wasn’t bothered enough to make that happen. I find the whole package very charming, but it’s a bit of a curio now.

Will I ever play it again? I’d be totally interested to play it against someone, but if there was an Atari 800 set up somewhere I was I’d be gagging to play MULE over this.

Final Thought: A weird note here is that Rainbow Arts, German publisher of Turrican etc. put out a version of this for Amiga and called Master Blazer that bothers to put in a tournament mode. However Amiga Power never wrote about it even once (!) which makes me assume it’s not worth revisiting.