Crystball (Supervision) | Retro Review
Platform: Watara Supervision
Year: 1992
Developer: Bon Treasure
Publisher: Watara
The Watara Supervision is a largely forgotten competitor to Nintendo’s Game Boy. The handheld, (also known as the Quickshot Supervision, Travell Mate and Hartung SV-100) obviously didn’t make anywhere near the same cultural impact as Nintendo’s offering. One very important factor that led to the phenomenal success of the Game Boy was the pack-in title Tetris. The Soviet tetromino-arranging puzzler took the world by storm and provided an addictive brain-engaging experience for all who were lucky enough to get their hands on a Game Boy.
If you decided to opt for the Supervision as your choice of portable gaming system, your pack-in game would have been Crystball. Can this game stand toe-to-toe against the Russian puzzling juggernaut? Well let’s take a look and find out.
Whereas Tetris was a huge deal in the early 90s with a gameplay style unlike what had come before; Crystball is a clone of Atari’s Breakout, a game that was already 16 years old by 1992. A complete lack of originality is not always a sign of a bad game however; I’ve played plenty of enjoyable Breakout clones. It’s a simple concept that can easily be changed up a bit to offer a fun experience.
You know the drill. Hit the ball, smash the bricks.
Crystball does add on some extra bells and whistles to this old formula to make it feel a little less seventies. There are power-ups (and power-downs) including paddle elongation and a bigger ball that can smash through multi-hit blocks in one go. Some blocks will not be destroyed when hit, but will rather release an animal on to the playing field. The animals will act as obstacles and will deflect the ball off in a different direction.
This bird and bunny (yes, that’s a rabbit), will do all they can to ruin your day.
Some levels will even incorporate some Pac-Man style warp tunnels, allowing the ball to warp from one side of the playfield to the other. This is something that has a lot of potential in a game like this and can really help this much copied formula feel fresh. There was one stage where some blocks were separated off from the rest of the playfield by an impenetrable wall, and were only accessible via the warp tunnel. That seemed like a much more creative use of this style of gameplay and I would have loved it if more stages were like this one. Sadly, most stages a pretty generic ‘just break the bricks’ affairs. You’ll play a stage with a dash of creativity, heightening your expectations for the following stages; only to have those expectations dashed by the next stage and it’s barebones Breakout approach.
Here it is. Probably the most interesting stage in the game.
Continues are unlimited, so if you wanted to see every stage you could likely do so. You’re main adversity in this venture would be the boredom of playing generic stage after generic stage. For this review, I played 21 stages. It was about an hour of gameplay and honestly, I was done by then and really couldn’t handle much more. If you do want to play this game for more than a few minutes, make sure you turn the volume off. There is only one, short, repetitive song that plays during game play (and another even more repetitive one between levels). This will undoubtedly drive you to the point of madness! Don’t blame me if you play this game for a couple of hours, only to find yourself at three in the morning, butt-naked at an all-night petrol station shouting about pigeons.
The worst thing about this game for me is how the ball bounces. It only seems to bounce at 45 degree angles. The speed of your paddle when you hit the ball, or where on your paddle you hit the ball, do not seem to matter. The ball either bounces 45 degrees up and to the left, or 45 degrees up and to the right. This makes it feel like you don’t really have much control and the ball’s just doing what it wants to do and your only job is to make sure it doesn’t fly past you. When there’s just one block left it can take what feel like eons to finally hit that elusive block and finally end the stage.
Just hitting the ball can be harder than it should be too. When the ball bounces off blocks or walls, it only goes in those same 45 degree angles too. These sharp angles can make it very difficult to get to the ball after it bounces off a nearby block. I also experienced a few collision issues where the ball would just fly through the paddle. Admittedly, this didn’t happen very often, but it was still annoying when it did.
At least this game has a difficulty selection! I am a huge fan of difficulty selections in games and I think all games should have them. In Crystball the difficulty selection just changes the speed of the ball.
Cute chequered tortoises; what more could you ask for?
In summary, this is a fairly unremarkable Breakout clone. It does show some promise with level design here and there, but sadly does not live up to its potential. Some nuances of other similar block smashers, like the ability to hit the ball at different angles, are not present and really hit the gameplay hard. The music will drive you crazy so you’ll probably want to mute this one. Power-ups and warp tunnels help pick this game up and give it a nice sprinkling of intrigue. In all, this isn’t a game that will hold your interest for very long, but if you were on a long train journey, this would at least provide some mental stimulation. In all, this is an extremely middle-of-the-road experience. It may not be particularly good, but I still couldn’t really call it a bad game. As pack-ins go, it’s no Tetris that’s for sure, but it is better than nothing. [5/10]
