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 of Mad Marble Maze include:
- 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.
- Okami has several "push a ball" puzzles, ranging from merely annoying to infuriating. That One Sidequest involves rolling three of them up a hill.
- Perplexus
- Oxyd