1990 · Hudson Soft · Puzzle

Timeball

Get wrapped up in this mind-bending game that will test your mental agility. The action seems simple -- just keep a ball rolling through a winding maze by shifting around pieces of tubing. But the action is intense! Race against time and the track to keep the ball from crashing. There are 100 challenging levels -- plus the unique edit feature lets you build your own puzzles!

Released: 31 December 1990
Platforms: Game Boy Sharp X1 TurboGrafx-16
Genres: Puzzle
Developers: Hudson Soft Tonkin House Now Production
Publishers: NEC Hudson Soft Tonkin House Brøderbund Software
Modes: Local multiplayer Multiplayer Single-player

About

Timeball is a puzzle video game released by NEC for the TurboGrafx-16. The object of the game is to guide a ball along pieces of track by moving tiles like a sliding puzzle. The game's name in Japan is Blodia, an anagram of Diablo, the title of a computer game upon which Blodia is based. Versions of Blodia were released exclusively in Japan for the original Game Boy and the X68000.

A spin-off titled Blodia Land: Puzzle Quest was released for the Famicom, replacing the ball with cartoon dinosaur-like characters. These versions were developed by Tonkin House and published by Broderbund.

Keywords

abstract

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The grid on screen is composed of tiles. Some tiles have a piece of road, and a black tile represents "the void", an area where one can drag the tile nearby in order to complete a road which will be taken by a ball that will follow the path. Players must arrange the tiles such that the ball traverses all sections of track. The ball can be sped up by pressing a button. If the ball reaches a tile without a piece of track, it falls out of play.

The game also includes a level editor which allows for the creation of custom puzzles. An earlier "prototype" version without the level editor was published for the TI-99/4a and other computers as "Diablo" in 1985.