N-Philes

Balls of Fury

Posted November 21st 2007 by Matthew Warren.

This is going to be a very special review. I am going to do something that I have never done before in a review, and you will appreciate it. For the first time, I am going to render the rest of this article completely worthless, and I am going to do it by summing everything up in one sentence: Balls of Fury is a complete atrocity and a blight on the face of video gaming, and it is worth neither your leisure time, your money, the time it will take you to walk by it in the store, or the energy your brain will spend interpreting the signals your eyes send it as you look at the cover. You can stop reading now, if you want, or you can keep going, if you would like to see the depths of suck to which this game reaches.

Balls of Fury is a turd of a video game dropped by Black Lantern Studios, the company responsible for video game classics like Elf Bowling 1 & 2, Lionel Trains: On Track, and John Deere: Harvest in the Heartland. With a history like that, how could Balls of Fury not be good? It is based off of the movie of the same name, and, according to Rotten Tomatoes, a solid 75% of the population thinks that the movie sucks. Unfortunately for Black Lantern Studios (and solidly in the tradition of licensed games), the movie is better than the video game.

Unless somebody can prove otherwise, I fully believe that instead of coding an actual game for the Wii, Black Lantern Studios simply programmed a Flash emulator and dropped in a Flash game, called it Balls of Fury, and released it. The graphics are horribly textured, pixelated, and boxy – characters look more like Pez dispensers than actual humans. The ball doesn't even touch the paddle before it bounces back to your opponent. I have seen better animation and collision detection in Atari 5200 games.

As far as gameplay goes, here is a simple test: Can you move your hand? If so, you are more than qualified to complete the game. The paddle does not move in relation to the Wii remote's position, so the majority of a match is spent waving the remote in the air wildly, hoping it will connect with the ball – and 90% of the time, it does. No spin, no power meters, no nothing. I literally won an entire game with my eyes closed.

The presentation, as you would expect, is equally awful. The menus are boring and dull, the "storyline" is presented through still images of the movie (not a video clip to be found), and the idiotic one-liners mercilessly repeated by the announcer are so grating that I muted the TV and listened to the radio instead. This game manages to get absolutely everything wrong on every single level.

Flatline - Balls of Fury deserves a castration.

If you are still reading with the intent of buying or even renting this, I am going to offer you a piece of advice: Light your money on fire instead. Go pick up a match, ignite it, and watch your cash turn to ash. You will be providing yourself with the same level of entertainment as you would receive playing Balls of Fury.

Posted in: Reviews

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