CTIA 2005 Marble Maniacs Hands-On

SAN FRANCISCO--Marble Maniacs, one of InfoSpace Mobile's new projects, is clearly intended to bolster the casual side of its portfolio--kind of along the lines of Gameloft's Super Block Breaker or Glu Mobile's AstroPop. This silly aim-and-shoot game has very simple gameplay, but it's decked out with several crazy characters, neat auto-generated courses, unlockable trophies, and a surprisingly sonorous soundtrack. In other words, we liked the way our demo looked at CTIA.

Marble Maniacs is a hybrid game of pool and minigolf that features a Snood-like ball cannon at the bottom of the screen. That may seem like a complicated mental image, but the game is anything but: you move the cannon's trajectory right and left, then launch your colored ball toward the appropriately colored hole. There are lots of bonus bumpers, special stars, and other pinball-like paraphernalia to hit on the way to the hole for extra points...but it's all for naught if you don't sink the shot.

From what we've seen, Marble Maniacs' attraction will lie mostly in its wealth of content. There are four differently themed "planets" to play on, each with special goodies on its boards, and a different zany space alien playing host. When we earned a gold medal on one board, our histrionic pink host popped onto the screen, claiming that "an international conspiracy" had produced her loss and now she was wondering where her pills were (we expect no less from the other three alien gamesters). There will be 125 different boards to play on--some of which are only unlocked after earning gold medals on all of a planet's other boards--and they'll be randomly regenerated every time you start a new career. The game will also feature 20 unlockable trophies, which will award you mad props for completing various tasks, like sinking 1000 balls.

The game's other really notable feature was its soundtrack, which was topped off with bumpin' MIDI-synth tunes on our test Nokia 6600. It's somewhat rare to hear multiple distinct tracks in mobile games, but we heard three or four separate themes during our short play session.