Glover

Once upon a time, a wizard ruled over a peaceful land. He spent his time cooking up potions atop his tower with the aid of his magical gloves, until one day, he mixed up the wrong ingredients and caused the brew to blow up in his face. This caused him to become encased in stone and fall backwards through the floor, while each of his gloves flew off in individual directions. One of the gloves flies out the window and lands outside, and here we have The Hero, Glover. Unfortunately, the other glove ended up falling into the cauldron, and emerged from it a sickly green color with red eyes, becoming the Big Bad, Cross-Stitch.

At the same time, the Crystal Balls that rested atop the spires of the tower flew from their positions. Glover freaked upon seeing this, and prevents them all from shattering and breaking by utilizing his magic power to turn all of them into rubber balls. They each bounce into warps surrounding the castle that lead to various, malevolent locations, and now it's up to our animated hand wear to retrieve the crystals, defeat Cross-Stitch, bring the wizard back to life, and restore peace to the land.

An obscure Nintendo 64 title developed by Interactive Studios and published by Hasbro Interactive in 1998. It also had another version that was released for the PlayStation, but unfortunately it turned out to be a Porting Disaster. It's a quirky platformer that requires actually using the Macguffins to solve puzzles and work contraptions. It also tended to be one huge Escort Mission, as if the Crystal Ball breaks or pops in any shape or form, you lost a life.

On that note, a sequel was planned to be released in 2000, but never got past the development stages. See the prototype here.


 * Big Boo's Haunt: The Fortress of Fear.
 * Bonus Stage: Collecting every Garib in both levels of a world unlocks a bonus level, where the point is to collect... even more Garibs. But it's necessary for Hundred-Percent Completion.
 * Character Title
 * Easy Mode Mockery: You can't unlock or play the Bonus Stages on Easy.
 * Escort Mission: As mentioned. In order to clear a stage, you have to bring the ball to the goal with you, which is of course always harder than simply walking there.
 * Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: The boss of Prehistoric, who also happens to be wearing stylin' shades.
 * Everything's Better with Monkeys: The bosses of Pirate are an orangutan and two Invincible Minor Minion monkeys.
 * Everything's Even Worse with Sharks: One of the enemies in Atlantis is a bipedal shark that tries to deal damage by bashing you with its nose.
 * Everything's Worse with Bees: Especially ones that shoot exploding stingers that send you and your ball flying about 100 feet away.
 * Frankenstein's Monster: Another boss who required you to perform some serious platforming in order to electrocute it without getting zapped yourself.
 * Gasshole: In the overworld, there's a chicken on a swing that would either fart, hiccup, burp, or cluck. This makes up a series of cheat codes.
 * Glove Slap: Not a textbook example, but Glover does this to hit the balls across pits and onto higher platforms.
 * Gravity Screw: In Out Of This World, as expected, you can jump really high. Necessary in the first stage, at least, where bouncing on the rubber ball can give you some extra height.
 * Hand Tropes: What did you expect?
 * Badass Finger-Snap
 * Evil Hand
 * Finger Gun
 * Four-Fingered Hands
 * Power Fist
 * Humongous Mecha: The final boss fight between you and Cross-Stitch involves two of these.
 * Last Lousy Point: I guarantee you, you will start ripping your hair out trying to find every last Garib.
 * Monster Clown: The boss of Carnival. Humorously enough, you kill it with a spring boxing glove, a Pie in the Face, and a Piano Drop.
 * Nintendo Hard: It starts out fairly easy, but the difficulty ramps up very quickly.
 * Shapeshifter Weapon: The Crystal Balls. Their standard forms are the rubber balls, and they can be transformed into, sequentially, a bowling ball, a little metal ball, and the normal Crystal itself. A Cheat Code unlocks an extra-bouncy super ball form as well.
 * Space Zone: Out Of This World, the last level in the game.
 * Take That: The commercial for the game featured blatant ersatzes of Cloud Strife, Lara Croft and Duke Nukem getting knocked about by Glover's ball.
 * Video Game Settings
 * Noob Cave: The optional training level inside the well.
 * Temple of Doom / Ruins for Ruins Sake: The Atlantis world.
 * Gang Plank Galleon: The Pirates world.
 * Circus of Fear: The Carnival level.
 * Hailfire Peaks / Prehistoria: The Prehistoric world.
 * Haunted Castle: The Fortress of Fear.
 * Space Zone: The 1st and 2nd levels of Out of This World.
 * Eternal Engine: The 2nd and 3rd levels of Out of This World.
 * White Gloves: Both of the wizard's gloves, though Cross-Stitch took on a sickly green after his Face Heel Turn.