Ball Balance - game

I found out about this game on alt.fan.mark-brian. (Yeah, I don't listen to them anymore, but I still lurk on the newsgroup. Heck, even when I *was* listening to them, I was still pretty much a full-time lurker.)

I know most people tend to play the more elaborate games on the net or Wii or Playstation or something, but I've pretty much stuck to simpler games. I think I've learned that if I were to get enamoured of a more involved game, I'd be wasting even more time than I do now playing games. A friend gave me a game called Leather Goddesses of Phobos years ago, and it was one of those adventure games, and I loved it. I sat down one night around 10pm to play for a little bit before going to bed for work the next day, and the next time I looked to see what time it was, it was 2am. Ooops. I've actually got a couple games in my cabinet, including one called "The Neverhood" that a friend got me quite some time ago, that I've never opened because they just look too incredibly interesting. Just so you know how old they are - they're on disk.

Anyway, so I've played this game called Ball Balance periodically, and it's a lot of fun. It does take some thinking and stuff, which is my downfall. :)





You're basically given a teeter-totter with weighted balls falling, and you have to drop them in places to keep them balanced. Any three like-colored balls, whether vertical or horizontal, will disappear. Here's the instruction page.





Oh, and there are three bonus things that can fall. One will take out whatever's on the same horizontal row that the bonus ball falls in. Another one will take out whatever vertical row the ball is dropped on. And the third is a "T", so it will take out the vertical row underneath it and the horizontal row that the ball falls in.

The scale will tilt left and right according to what you drop where and make disappear. You lose if you let it tilt too far in one direction. Here's what the beginning of the game looks like.





As far as I can tell, when the level indicator changes, it then has the potential to drop balls with that weight, so if you're on level 5, it won't drop balls with more weight than 5, but when you get to level 6, it can then drop balls with a weight of 6. Of course, you still get the lower-weighted balls as well. Here's what it looks like further into the game.





I don't always do that well, but a couple times, I've gotten a fairly decent score. I'm conscious of the balances and knowing that I can't make one row disappear without making sure it's covered with another weight so it doesn't tip all the way on the other side. When I screw that up is when I usually lose. I think I need to do more three-across colors rather than a stack of colors, because that helps with the balance, but that's harder to arrange.

Here's the link to the game if you'd like to try it. Have fun!