Cameltry

Description

There is a certain type of trinket that can be discovered in dingy game rooms. It is a maze that is traversed by a marble by subtly tilting the board, dancing with gravity and momentum, and deftly rolling your sphere out of dead ends and around the obstacles posed by holes in the board. Both Marble Madness and Cloud Kingdoms investigate this concept, but while Marble Madness does so from a skewed 3-D viewpoint, Cloud Kingdoms does so from a more conventional 2-D one. In both games, the player directly affects the behaviour of the ball. Instead of moving the ball around the board, you move the board around the ball in this game. Although the end result is the same, the game takes a unique approach to getting there.

That's right; from the very beginning, gravity pulls ever downward, downward, downward on your ball toward the bottom of your screen regardless of the board orientation; the job of the player is to rotate the board now clockwise, now counter-clockwise, to further a timely and unobstructed path beneath the ball in its progress toward each level's goal before the timer ticks down to zero. This must be accomplished before the timer reaches zero. It would have been just as appropriate to call the game "inertia." There are a lot of obstacles that can be sidestepped, but there are also some that have to be confronted head-on: you need to have a certain amount of momentum, if not terminal velocity, in order to break through crumbling brick barriers; other obstacles toggle on and off like traffic lights, making it necessary to not only have speed but also timing. In addition to merely slowing down the ball's progress, touching certain obstacles results in an additional time penalty. On the other hand, some blocks bestow time bonuses, provided that you are able to afford the ever-decreasing time required to take the scenic detour and collect them. Some blocks have an effect on the direction that the ball travels, and touching certain obstacles results in an additional time penalty.