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Mad Marble Maze

A common gameplay element (or, often, a game's whole premise) involving rolling some sort of sphere from the beginning of a level to the end. The player might be inside the ball, running atop of the ball or tilting the level to control the ball.

Examples:

Many wooden versions exist, generally having a pair of knobs to manipulate the angle of the field and a large number of holes before the end to get caught it.
Marble Madness is the archetypal video game version.
Super Monkey Ball
Marble Blast Gold
Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs features a Blood Sport version.
A demo of just this comes with HTC phones to show off the accelerometer.
Super Mario Galaxy has a few levels of this sort; there's a Power Star in the ball, and Mario has to get it to the end of the level to get it out of the ball.
Wii Fit has one exercise that consists of this, using the balance board.
Neverball, a free software Super Monkey Ball clone.
Twilight Princess has the minigame RollGoal in the boat rental shop. Beating every level allows you to use the frog lure.
The Mercury series are these, using a blob of mercury in lieu of a sphere.
Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath Of Cortex has a couple of levels like this, with Crash inside the ball.
This frustratingly difficult Web Game: http://www.wickedsmallgames.com/games/s/spin-the-black-circle/play-game.html
The Atlasphere round in American Gladiators.
Ballance
Hamsterball
The bizarre climax to The Muldoon Legacy.
That One Puzzle in Sonic 2006.
Ōkami has several "push a ball" puzzles, ranging from merely annoying to infuriating. That One Sidequest involves rolling three of them up a hill.
Perplexus