Remember Ballance? I entirely don’t. But Ziggurat is pulling it out of obscurity (maybe) and onto Steam and GOG on January 5.
Ziggurat recently reproduced another game, Boiling Point, just this past November. But while I had a lot of things to say about my experiences with that game, Ballance is completely new to me. It was released in 2004 by Cyparade and Atari to decent reviews. It apparently wasn’t completely forgotten since it got a sequel in 2019 (involving none of the original staff), and even has a Wikipedia page.
Speaking of its Wikipedia page, it says, “The game is now considered abandonware, and neither the developers nor publishers are actively tracking its copyrights.” Not anymore! Purge your hard drives. It lives again!
Anyways, Ballance is similar to the 1984 arcade classic, Marble Madness. It’s something of a puzzle platform where you navigate a ball through hazardous mazes. I guess, to use a more recent example, it’s a lot like Super Monkey Ball. It looks pretty fun, to be honest. Nothing in the press materials says whether anything has been fixed or updated in the new release. All the footage and screenshots of it show a 4:3 resolution.
By my standards, as long as it looks fine and runs fine, it’s good enough for a re-release. However, I am unable to confirm that it looks fine and runs fine.
You can find out for yourself when Ballance gets re-release on PC via GOG and Steam on January 5, 2024.
