Fizzball!
I’ve just found a wonderful new game! Fizzball works in MacOS X, Linux, and Windows. It’s jolly and fun, great for kids and adults, not too hard and not too easy. It’s sort of a pinball/breakout combo, but to make things interesting you need to rescue animals by hitting them with your ball. The ball (sort of a bubble, really) starts out very small and you can only rescue the tiny animals, but the ball grows as you progress and you can eventually rescue the big cows, sheep, and horses. The graphics are adorable, and there are lots of whimsical touches — the dogs start out sleeping, but the first time you bump into them with your ball, they wake up and open their eyes, and then the next time they stand up and bark. Monkeys hop up and down and scream, as all good videogame monkeys should.
As you play each level you get powerups, coins (used to progress to different islands and to feed the animals in the sanctuary), trophies, and other bonuses. I can imagine going back through the levels I’ve completed and attempting to collect the bonuses I missed on the first time through.
The good people at GrubbyGames have, as usual, provided a very generous demo version. You’ll be able to play for quite some time, and decide if you want to register. It’s only $20 to buy the game, a more-than-fair price for such a well-thought-out and entertaining game. Since we are a multi-computer, multi-OS family, I emailed the developer to see if they had a family discount or something, since we’re all three going to want to be able to play on our own computers. He emailed right back and said that we’ll only need to buy one copy, and we’ll be able to download as many versions as our family needs. How generous! How pleasant not to be treated like a criminal! If all companies treated their customers as fairly, there would be a lot less piracy.
Thanks, Grubby Games!