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I, Ball is a vertically scrolling shooter by Firebird from 1987. Iball, the hero giving the name to the game, sets forth to rescue his spherical colleagues from the claws of the terrible Terry Ball.

The game has 16 levels and after every fourth survived level one of the four friends is rescued, which are - Beware, groaner alarm! - the loveable "Lover Ball" (with lipstick and ribbon loops), the fruity-healthy "Eddy Ball", the globus-resembling "Glow Ball" and the noble "No Ball" (a crown). At the latest after these ludicrous puns one can guess that a bad joker must have conceived this game and accordingly the game does take itself with a pinch of salt.

Iball starts the game only equipped with a somehow roughly shooting "Bubble Gun", to defend against the omnipresent attackers, but he can stockpile his arsenal considerably during the course of the game by picking up rotating disks, from which he can also get bonus points and extra time.

The latter is urgently needed, as a scarce time limit of 50 seconds per level needs fast acting or one of the four lives will be lost.

To absolve a level, Iball needs to be steered through a parcour of normal and deadly, electrically loaded obstacles within the time limit to reach the home straight at the upper end of the track. For the time that is left, there are bonus points. Extra lives can exclusively be gained by collecting bonus disks.

Design

I, Ball was released as a budget title and is therefore graphically rather inconspicuous, if in places rather colourful. The blocky obstacles are as lean with details as the half a dozen different enemy sprites, which on the other hand are always displayed without any glints. The scrolling is programmed neatly.

Not so successful is the controls of the own pawn: The moment of inertia during the movement and the bouncing off from obstacles are cleary too strong, so that even with careful steering it can quickly happen that unwanted crashes with deadly objects happen. The rather poor colllision query here decides to the disadvantage of the player definitely too often, sometimes you just need to get close to a danger to lose a life.

Rob Hubbard "honored" the British Synthopopper Cabaret Voltaire in his design of the background music by a remix of her songs "Whip Blow" and "I want you" from the album "The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord" from 1985. By mixing the characteristically rather different pieces to a lively mixture somewhere between claustrophobic disco and cybernetic funk, he managed to create a lively and diversified track with scary undertones. If one doesn't like it, he can switch off the music and get instead sound effects from the upper middle-class.

Furthermore the game got given three short digi-samples: an incentive "IBALL!" in the title screen, an "OH NO!" when losing a life and a "GAME OVER!" performed with a distinct British accent, which all three can satisfy. Simon Pick who performed and created the voice samples for this game used the same technology employed in his C64 games Microrhythm and Slimey's mine.

The game does not have a highscore display. The only possibility to save a highscore is to quickly react in the moment when you lose your last life, and save a screenshot in the emulator or pull out the digicam very fast and make a picture on the real thing. For this you have about half a second. Very unsatisfying!

Hints

Extra weapons
Extra weapons can be obtained by touching the bonus disks and they will always appear in the same order. The Turbo-Boost can be fetched right at the start of the game, by collecting the disk, which materializes left to your start position. Collected extras are displayed in colour at the upper and lower border of the screen. After losing a life you will lose the last extra that you picked up. BEWARE: the bonus disk can also be shot - as it is with the enemies. If sound effects instead of music are activated, the appearing of a bonus disk is announced with a sound effect.


Turbo Boost: Raise speed of moving
Single Laser: Iball can shoot sideways in direction of view
Smart Missile: Destroys all aliens on the screen when pressing Space . Can only be used once!
Bullet Spray: Iball can spray upwards and downwards at the same time.
Molecule Bomb: Avoids for a short time that new aliens form by pressing M . Only once available!
Electro Shield: Immunises against electric obstacles for a short time. Duration is shown by a decreasing time bar at the upper right of the screen.
Hyperspace: Instant teleport to the goal.
Twin Laser: Iball can shoot to the left and right at the same time.
Fuel Injection: Raises the vertical moving speed.
Hyper Brakes: Improves the braking performance, but only for a short time.
Laser Cooling Unit: Avoids overheating of the laser.
Rainbow Ripple Laser: An extensive, kaleidoscope-like laser.

Between the weapons you can also receive bonus time, extra points and bonus lives.

There is also a bad extra, the "Faulty Disk", it provokes that until the loss of a life or the end of the current level all obstacles get electrified !
These rather nerving extras only appear after collecting the "Twin Lasers", which is later in the game.