Time to finish YMMV page: 48
- Awesome Music: In part due to using a Yamaha FM sound chip, very similar to that which would later be used for the Sega Genesis. The Beginner Race music
is usually the highlight. - Breather Level: While still fairly hard, the Silly Race is somewhat easier than the Aerial Race. In particular, it's the only level in the game where you can actually refill the timer (by cathartically squishing tiny versions of regular enemies).
- Catharsis Factor: The Silly Race allows you to turn the tables on the annoying enemies in the game and squish them.
- It's Short, So It Sucks!: If Marble Madness has a major criticism, it's that the game can be beaten in a manner of minutes. It gets even worse with ports that lower the number of levels in the game. Even with the sequel's increased number of levels and the population of hostile mobs, it too can be beaten in roughly 10 minutes by a skilled player.
- Memetic Mutation: "Everything you know is wrong."
- Nintendo Hard: The final three courses, due to a combo of narrow track designs and low time limits. The Ultimate Race is the worst of the lot by far, with weird track surfaces, enemies in the worst possible places, and disappearing track sections in the final run to the goal—It does not help either that, in the Master System version at least, the music has the nasty habit of occasionally playing slower in the final part, distracting you.
- Polished Port:
- The 16-bit ports of the system (apart from the Atari ST and Apple IIGS versions) are all basically arcade perfect, with only the occasional bout of wonky controls and/or ball physics, plus the NEC PC-98 version suffering from heavily dithered graphics, but none of these faults detract too much from the end result.
- The Nintendo Entertainment System port of the game is usually considered the best effort at porting the game to an 8-bit system, with the graphics making it across largely intact despite the system's limitations, the controls being translated quite well to the NES's d-pad, and the soundtrack being arguably even better than the arcade original courtesy of David Wise. The Sega Master System version is a close runner-up, only slightly let down by the controls being a bit more finicky, and a couple of missing animations.
- Tengen's Japan-exclusive Sega Genesis port is much more closer to the arcade original, in both sound and graphics, when compared to the version that Electronic Arts released, though both versions are good in their own right
- Porting Disaster: With so many ports of the game, and the arcade original's trackball controls not being that easy to translate to other control forms, it was inevitable that some of the ports wouldn't measure up:
- The versions released for the Commodore 64, Apple ][ and MS-DOS (which shared the same code base) rapidly became a chore to play, thanks to the courses being made much narrower, and the enemy AI being ludicrously aggressive. On top of that, the Apple ][ version suffered from atrocious controls, while the MS-DOS version had ugly CGA graphics.
- The Atari ST and Apple IIGS ports were both decent graphics-wise, but were let down by poor frame-rates, unresponsive controls, and ball physics that were essentially non-existent.
- Somehow, the ports on the Game Boy family got worse as the systems got more advanced. The port for the original Game Boy is decent enough for the most part, thanks to sharing the same code as Rare's NES version — probably the best-known and most renowned of the home ports — but suffers a fatal flaw in that after the fifth race you get kicked back to the second race. The Game Boy Color port benefits from better graphics, but has much worse music and controls, wonky ball physics, and needlessly ramps up the difficulty by reducing the extra time given to the player in each level, meaning that you'll be lucky to see it past the third level. But at least the fourth through sixth levels actually exist in that version, unlike the Game Boy Advance version, which chops out the entire second half of the game and gives a Game Over after the third level is beaten.
- The ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions are essentially a Reformulated Game where you try to guide your marble across single screens. Despite at least trying to address the limitations of their respective systems, these versions are perhaps the worst incarnation of the game, due to their ludicrously slow gameplay and bad level design, on top of the predictable poor controls.
- Spiritual Successor:
- Super Monkey Ball is basically Marble Madness in 3D with monkeys and Nintendo Hard difficulty.
- Hamsterball is a more straightforward example.
- That One Level: The Aerial Race was as far as a lot of players got. Not only is it the longest course in the game, but it's full of narrow, winding paths, with a ton of obstacles just waiting to knock you off.
