Marble Madness - Klax for Game Boy Adv Reviews by Gamers

We all know that developers can't just snap their fingers and instantly make classic games work on the Game Boy Advance. The comparatively underpowered GBA hardware needs tender loving care in order to get accurate renditions of the old-school properties, but with the right teams on the job it's clearly possible. Just look at Konami Arcade Advance, Namco Museum, Atari Anniversary Advance, and Nintendo's own Classic NES series titles to see the best of the arcade best on the handheld.

Clearly the right teams weren't on DSI Games' classic Midway and Atari ports on the Game Boy Advance. The company has released more than a half dozen multi-game classic packs over the past month featuring popular retro arcade games, and the low-end price tag attached to the cartridges are clearly indicative of the budgets and development cycles given to these terrible ports. Klax / Marble Madness is one of the more "high end" game brands of the multi-game packs released by DSI Games, because the games included in this cartridge are two of the most recognizable and successful titles in the classic Atari Games library.

You definitely do not want to buy this game for Marble Madness. No matter how much of a fan you may have been of the original arcade game. This GBA conversion is one of the sloppiest, incompetent ports of the arcade game ever seen on a home system. In fact, many elements indicate that the studio cut the development before the game was even completed. Let alone the absolutely broken controls, busted and non-existent rolling physics (the marble "slides" instead of "rolls", for example), and lack of two player competition. No, the worst part of this port: it ends after level three.

That's right. A six level game ends at level three. I don't care if you're on the smallest GBA cartridge possible: one half of a four megabyte cartridge is plenty of space to get all of Marble Madness in there. Rare got the game on a miniscule NES cartridge nearly 20 years ago, and yet a development studio today can't even manage to get 50% of a 1985 arcade game on way more silicon. The last three levels were most likely cut for time purposes than space concerns, as the programmer didn't even have time to implement the wave motion machine at the end of level three. Either way, a horrendous port of half of an arcade champion is an absolute travesty.

Which is why it pains me to say that the other portion of this cartridge, Klax, is actually spot-on great. Why must the port of Klax be near perfect, and Marble Madness be so god-awful terrible?

Klax is the reason to pick up this cartridge, because even after more than a decade the game still holds up as a truly puzzle great. Its concept spawned from the Tetris craze where everyone and their sister attempted to out-design the Russian classic. Klax, a design created for the arcade and ported to every videogame system conceived since that time, is a clever idea where players shuffle through advancing color tiles and deposit them quickly into the bin below. Forming strings of three, four or five colors in a row is called a "Klax", and they're removed from play when they're created. Each level has its own criteria to meet to give the design a little more variety.

This GBA port is really great, right down to the digitized samples lifted from the arcade game. The only thing missing is a battery save to record high scores, but considering that no game system port -- with the exception of the arcade emulations in Midway Arcade Treasures -- saved the high scores, it's a minor quibble. The designers felt the need to move the "fling tiles back" controls to the other action button instead of the original arcade's "joystick up" command, but otherwise this is Klax done right.

But since this is a review of the package and not Klax, Marble Madness absolutely destroys this compilation's value.

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