Marble Madness
Fuck Milton Bradley. Seriously. Once, I was a gawky little waddler in elementary school. I was a good kid. A hard worker. My whole life was ahead of me. Anyway, my mom gave me a copy of Marble Madness for Christmas one year and just like that my childhood was over. I was old well before my time. The stress that this game and its punishing difficulty caused me was such that within a week I was a pack-a-day smoker. I was porking my secretary and fondly remembering my full head of hair. For starters, this shit was made to be played in an arcade with a trackball. Somehow, when controlling a marble it doesn’t seem as intuitive to use four arrows as it is to use-just watch me here- a giant effing marble. The opening screen basically admits this and then brazenly mocks you by allowing you to choose the angle at which your button presses are translated into movement.
Your options are basically down=down or alarm clock=outer space. It almost doesn’t matter which one you pick, as the game is pretty much impossible either way. Marble Madness only has 5 levels, each of which has a time limit of around a minute, so D.A.R.Y.L could conceivably beat the game in 5 minutes. This is the crux of why it is so infuriating, as I was never able to get past level 4, leaving me to play the same 3 and a half minutes over and over and over and over again. The levels are called: Beginner, Intermediate, Aerial, Silly, and Ultimate. Fuck. The first level is insultingly easy. You navigate your marble, who from here on out will be called Milton Bradley is a Cock, through about 20 feet of wide track and through a couple flags.
When you get to the second level, rather than ramp things up slowly, you are immediately confronted with an evil black marble called Milton Bradley’s Mom is a Goat.
I’m not even going to detail the next couple of levels. They are basically a gauntlet through which you coax Milton Bradley is a Cock while assaulted on all sides by sucky worms, pools of Milton Bradley’s mom’s saliva, and vacuum cleaners. It sucks.
Then Milton Bradley decides that it’s time to get into your head.
The Ultimate race wouldn’t even be that bad, if it wasn’t for the last screen, wherein you are forced to travel terrain that shifts under you while Milton Bradley’s Mom is a Goat tries to dry-hump Milton Bradley is a cock. It’s dirty, it’s wrong, and I won’t stand for it.
Finally, as a reward, some drunken asshole pukes on the screen and congratulates Left Player.
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