Ballance

File:Ballance 9254.jpg

Merrily we roll along...

Ballance is a relaxing action/puzzle Mad Marble Maze computer game for windows, where you control a ball, trying to get it to the exit across 15 levels which are ensembles of wooden platforms, metal rails and wooden gutters. Of course, since your "hero" is a ball, you don't walk, but rather roll around - and you better watch out for inertia, as the levels are built with No OSHA Compliance and you can easily slip and fall into the colorful void around. There are a lot of puzzles to solve by figuring out the right directions for your ball to take.

Physics play an important role in the game: by running into special "material changers", your ball can assume one of three different materials, each of them having a different weight:

• Paper: Being the lightest has its privileges - you can zoom easily across pits, make use of floor fans, and climb steep slopes - but your journey will be brutally interrupted when you come across any sort of obstacle, since you won't be able to push it out of the way.
• Wood: The average ball. It can negotiate its way up most slopes and push some obstacles out of the way; but it still cannot do some things.
• Stone: The heaviest one, and thus some gaps and slopes are impassable for it - but it can push heavy objects such as bridges, switches or other stone balls which inexplicably happen to lie around and block your way.

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Tropes used in Ballance include:

• Check Point
• Crate Expectations: Who scattered all these crates throughout the levels?
• Floating Platforms: Not all. Some are set up on incredibly long poles that seem to reach down hundreds of kilometres onto the planet in the void below.
• Flying Saucer: Pops up in the ending.
• Fragile Speedster: Paper
• Jack of All Stats: Wood
• Mad Marble Maze
• Mighty Glacier: Stone
• Score Screen
• Vent Physics: Fans to propel the paper ball upwards.
• Wreaking Havok