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Sticky Balls E3 2005 Hands-On Report

We get our hands on Gizmondo's Sticky Balls during a playable E3 demo.

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The title Sticky Balls may evoke a number of different images, but none would be quite so accurate (and harmless) as gelatinous spheres that you knock around a table, attempting to infuse them into one. That's exactly what you were thinking, wasn't it? Sticky Balls is really a simple puzzle game for the Gizmondo, which plays something like pool, and where all the balls have the tendency to stick to each other.

The objective of the game is to hit balls with a pool cue into others of the same color, until you have collected all the balls of that one color, which will cause them to disappear. On the first level, you simply begin with two balls, but as the levels progress, you're required to connect more and more. The difficulty of this lies in there being other colored balls on the table, which you need to try not to hit, or else they'll ruin your current collection of sticky balls. As you collect balls into your amorphous bunch, they do not move quite so directly and swiftly across the table, so you must take into account the shape of your mass before you launch it. At any point in the game, though, you can change the ball that you're hitting, whether it's a different ball in the blob that has been stuck together (it's often better to aim with the middle ball, so the mass moves more cohesively) or an entirely different color altogether, which you may opt to hit to get out of the way so you can move some others. The strategy is interesting and it's unlike any other game currently available.

To further compound the difficulty, you receive point bonuses for being more creative with your collection methods. Instead of hitting balls directly into each other, you'll be significantly rewarded for trying to bank shots or pull off combos. Since you'll have the ability to control the strength, direction, and location of the ball that you're hitting across the table, you'll therefore have a number of different ways to successfully get through a level.

Sticky Balls is coming along quite nicely and looks like it will be an interesting addition to any puzzle fan's collection.

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