With Cybernoid appearing yesterday in the Your Sinclair Top 100, the bar has been set pretty damn high for our next contender to pass. So it’s going to be interesting to see if this budget labelled game – I, Ball 2 – from Firebird, currently sat at No.#35 can do that.
I, Ball 2 arrived in 1987 (the same year as I, Ball) from Timothy Closs, who would go on to make one of the most well-known games on the future 16-bit machines Kid Gloves; however it’s on the ZX Spectrum he cut his teeth with I, Ball and Bomber Bob in Pentagon Capers.
In I,Ball 2 you are a member of the highly developed, intelligent Ball race (no really) and you intend on travelling into your past, to retrieve artefacts from your ancestors that may give you a further insight into your current state of being. With numerous dangers, different blocks with strange properties that you will need to use carefully, this and there are objects that you will to collect to pass onto the next level.
Here is another moment in the Your Sinclair Top 100 where you’re unsure what the original chart compilers where thinking!? We’ve just had three truly classic games packed with gameplay pass us by – including Cybernoid – then they springing this on us; a game which not only doesn’t look overly great but it really doesn’t play overly well either. You feel like you’re fighting with the keyboard all the time, especially when you’re trying to get quick changes made for firing. Another issue with I, Ball 2 is the constant switching from one level to another – that it forces upon you – you’re not allowed to practice on a set level as it wants you to sample everything at once.
However the biggest nightmare within the game is the cheery synthesized speech; though at the time this would have received a thumbs up for being clear, now all I can think of is that the game has been programmed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s Genuine People Personalities technology department, as I hear it with such glee scream out, “OK, LETS GO!” when I start the game.
I, Ball 2 is not a game I wanted to play after Cybernoid, nor is it a game I wanted to play really at all. It may have been a great budget title back in 1991 but here in 2016 time has really, really not been kind to it.
Originally published July 24, 2016. Updated October 25, 2022.
