Marble Mage

While looking for a marble-game to scratch my marble itch, I found this little gem. It's short and sweet, and has a lot of small features that really make it shine compared to other marble games: - You can slow time and pivot on a dime. This completely changes how the game feels (and makes it more like a golf game than a marble game IMO) - Many levels contain guard-rails. This reduces the frustration of falling off and restarting. - If you fall off, the level instantly restarts, which is nice - saves time/effort when repeated a lot. - Slow-motion while aiming, makes aiming much easier, and lets you pull off cool mid-air tricks - Each level has three separate goals (complete, time, collect) which you can complete indepdently - so you can focus on finishing, exploring, or racing as you like - Levels are quite short and fun - It has an actual story! - It runs natively on Linux The only thing I didn't like, is that sound didn't work for me (on Arch).

A totally playable "Super Monkey Ball" clone that is unfortunately not perfectly designed and occasionally broken. The broken nature of it actually made it more fun to play, kind of like how in Mario 64 you can often come up with your own solutions because the game is so free and open with the controls. You're just trying to reach the exit portal, and/or collecting all the gems and finishing within a certain time limit. Usually in games like this you tilt the environment but here you control the ball, which is fine except the controls kind of are terrible. The marble mage can boost by holding a button and the speed stacks, but it can be taken away at any time for seemingly no reason because the game can't seem to grasp the concept of acceleration. Beyond that you can even boost in midair and flip directions in midar which breaks the game since sometimes you can cheat and completely go over obstacles whereas other times you will just fall to your death. I enjoyed figuring out tricks to get through certain parts, like bouncing off a certain wall to bypass an area or charging at the top of a ramp to fly across the map. The game doesn't seem to encourage or condone this, it's just sort of in there for you to decide at your discretion. I also really like the music, so even though it's pretty busted and dumb it's also kind of fun to play, but I was 100% done with it in three hours.