We got the team back together and did a spiritual successor, Marble It Up!. If you are still enjoying the original I’d recommend checking it out (on consoles and Steam).
I have many fond memories playing Marble Blast on a G5 iMac as a teen, I think it came to our Internet-less house bundled with the iMac along with Glider Pro which I think came via CD.
I managed to get Marble Blast ultra running on my Steam deck, but the controls weren't amazing.
Marble It Up runs like a top, and scratches that itch I have for the original.
Cool. I have have a least one of my custom maps on there.
It was my son's favorite game when he was 3-5, so I started making maps that couldn't be failed, working my way up to some tricky things.
At one point I made a birthday cake map and my wife decorated a cake to look like it. Ring pops for the gems, and an upside down reese's peanut butter cups decorated with icing for the start/finish pads. Of note, putting icing on a reese's does taste good, it is a step too far for human consumption.
Yo, that's awesome and incredibly sweet. There's actually a centralized repository nowadays with all custom levels for the game, here: https://marbleland.vaniverse.io/
Thank you so much for posting this. This looks a lot like the game I played back then, but I cannot find videos of the last level which I always played... guess there's only one way to find out...
Macs released from 2002-2005 shipped with Marble Blast Gold on them.
Playing it is one of my earliest memories (I was 5 at the time), especially taking absolutely forever to figure out the two Escher's Maze levels.
Is it normal that when I "turn" the camera stays still? Makes it quite unplayable for me (I tried both "Free camera" enabled/disabled, it didn't change anything)
You won't believe this: it _is_ playable on mobile! I see a lot of people playing this on their phones and iPads.
I contemplated adding gyro controls, like in "Marble Blast Mobile" from back in the day, but they are very imprecise and don't really scale well to high-level play. With the current d-pad controls, there's actually a mobile player who holds the world record on many levels. Never would've expected mobile controls to scale this far.
Gyroscopic control might be even more suited for something like Neverball where the physics are based on tilting the board. In Marble Blast the board was stationary but the ball could be moved by acceleration which turns out to be quite different in terms of controls.
https://marbleblastultra.com/
I believe this is a reverse engineered port based on the Xbox 360 version.
I play it on my steamdeck once in a while. I like having native controller support now that I’m getting older.