iPhone App Reviews

Shuffle Ball

T.J. Brumfield | Jul 19, 2009 Games

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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I remember fondly my youth as I would pour over Nintendo Power magazines while drinking Jolt cola and watching Alf. Okay, looking back it doesn’t seem nearly as awesome. But in those days I often played computer and arcade games that featured simple vector graphics aping at 3D. Some of these games were supposedly 3D versions of pong, or table tennis, where I’d hit a ball (often an ugly vector creation) with my neon-colored paddle, bouncing it to a computer opponent. Homestar Runner’s Strongbad Zone plays upon this if you are curious what I’m talking about.

Ibis Inc. also recaptures that classic look and feel with Shuffle Ball. We live in a retro-generation where everything that was deemed no longer cool is suddenly cool again. So certainly there is an audience for older gamers who want to revisit their youth, or younger gamers who are curious about these so-called classics us grumps can’t stop yapping about.

There is one game mode. All the classics of the 80′s were content to have one game mode. So again, perhaps the simplicity is meant to hark back to those years. Or it could be that this is a 99 cent that is simply light on features.

Either way, pressing start brings you right into the game. You are a blue paddle that seems to move with no one directly touching or controlling it. You are floating in space within a glass box. One would assume you don’t want to break these glass walls in space, but that is precisely what you are aiming to do. You send balls flying toward the insidious red paddle. Everyone knows the red paddle is a vile force of nature akin to the New York Yankees. The red paddle must be defeated for the universe to be made right. Though arguably you are both cracking the same glass housing, and thusly working towards the same goal. Perhaps your true antagonist is the unseen shadowy force that keeps replacing the broken glass panels with new ones.

Pressing and then releasing serves the ball. If you move your finger before releasing, you will issue a curving serve. You start off with a level one opponent. Scoring twice against an opponent brings you to a higher level opponent, who as expected, is slightly more difficult.

Your health and your opponent’s health are represented by blue and red ball icons respectively on the bottom left. If your enemy has one ball showing, that means they have one life remaining after this one. So while you show five balls at the start of a game, that means you effectively have six lives. Blue paddles are thusly proven mathematically to be two-thirds of a cat.

In the early levels I found myself scoring a good number of aces with an effective curve serve. This may be counter-intuitive as my entry on the high score list was actually lower than other players who ended on a lower level. Allowing the computer to return your serve and rally does score more points, but anytime the computer returns your serve you have the chance of losing a life. But arguably the gameplay completely hinders on your desire to take chances. The faster you get the ball going, the harder it will be for you to return it if the computer manages to hit it back to you. If you hit with the corner of your paddle, you angle the ball making it harder to return, but you run the risk of missing the ball my aiming with the edge of your paddle.

There are other maneuvers you can use that I was initially completely unaware of because the game features no instructions at all. It reminded me of parenthood. This also no doubt accounts for my lower score. I only learned of these by going to the developer’s website. I intend to go back and play some more now that I know about these secret techniques.

By shaking the iPhone on a return, you smash the ball harder. You can do this as often as you like. You can also call up a barrier which covers the whole screen, protecting yourself from being scored on. Barriers are activated by pinching your fingers together and then expanding them. You have a finite number of barriers, which is displayed by a number of paddle icons on the bottom right.

If you perform a smash return inside the inner frame of your paddle, you activate a super smash that is invincible. Performing a smash return while pulling up a barrier also guarantees a super smash. I won’t fault you if you shout “Hulk Smash!” when executing this move. I’m not here to judge.

At the end of ten levels you must face a “boss”. I wasn’t aware this was a boss, or that my opponent was particularly different except the ball was replaced with a red ball after the tenth level. Perhaps it is my imagination, except the red ball seemed to move quicker.

Depth perception was sometimes difficult to gauge. However, there is an outline that moves across the glass box to show you where the ball is on the proverbial Z axis, which is a nice touch.

This game is different from other 3D pong/table-tennis clones not only in the linear progressing difficulty, bosses and special maneuvers, but also in that physics are especially odd in this game. In pong and brick-breaking games, physics is already odd enough that bouncing off a still surface actually increases the speed of the ball as opposed to stopping it. This game is no exception, so curving a serve into a corner or wall is an especially effective tactic. Your opponent has difficulty gaging where the ball will bounce, but there is a speed change coming as well.

This game takes it one step further. Balls have spin, such as the curve serve I described earlier. The ball will also curve occasionally when bouncing off walls, or on a return. I can’t consistently replicate the behavior or explain it, but the ball is clearly like Keira Knightley, and it wants to “Bend it like Beckham”.

Another thing I didn’t immediately realize is that the paddle follows your finger’s movements, but you don’t have to grab the paddle directly. You can swipe your finger anywhere on the screen. This is especially useful in that one of my biggest complaints is that my fingers often impeded my view of the screen, and thusly the ball. The opponents I played against weren’t that difficult, at least at lower levels. I found I was often my own worst enemy by blocking my view and missing the ball as it flew past me. Gold Five kept telling me to “stay on target”.

Touching the screen in different places helps alleviate this issue, but if my finger starts low on the screen, I have difficult moving my paddle even lower when I need to. In all fairness, this problem would presumably be present on all touch-based pong games. The only solution I could think of would be to utilize a tilt-based control. That might be difficult to balance on how sensitive the tilt controls are. I’d like to see this as an option, whether or not to use tilt at all, and if implemented, a sensitivity slider.

If tilt was the control mechanism for moving the paddle, you’d have to tap to smash as opposed to shaking. Multi-player was also noticeably absent. Alternate game modes, such as jumping to a set difficulty, or perhaps a survival mode with one ball would be welcome additions. But then again, perhaps this is meant to be like simple arcade classics. At 99 cents you have a new twist on classic gameplay. That should be good enough for some.

Tags: $0.99, Games, T. J. Brumfield