There’s been some small amount of drama lately surrounding the moving and then returning of Xbox LIVE Indie games to and from the Games menu. When I come across games like Fireball, from Radiangames, it makes me wonder why anyone ever bothers with the actual XBLA games. This game is $1 (80 MSP) and will offer literally hour after hour of low stress, very-entertaining gameplay.
The premise is this: you are a 
fireball. You cannot shoot. You cannot run into things. What you can do is dodge all the bad things that are coming after you, and while doing so, get close to and trigger bombs, which then destroy the enemies. The enemies drop sparks which you can grab for points and boost. The bigger the combo, the more points, exponentially. Plus, if you cause an explosion that kills 50 or more enemies you get a Nova which is a huge explosion just waiting for you to run into it. Great in case of emergency or too many enemies on the screen.
That’s it. But in similar fashion to what made Geometry Wars great and Biology Battle cool, Fireball lets you cruise around an oblong game field pretty much as long as you can survive. There are no lives or power ups. Just you, bombs and enemies.
In that
simplicity is its brilliance. See, you don’t even shoot. You just have to swing near a bomb to trigger the three second countdown. So your left brain doesn’t even need to coordinate with your right brain. You can move with the left stick (right brain) and not worry about the right stick for shooting. The game is actually quite relaxing and when I die I find that it’s because my mind sort of wandered off a bit and I was on auto-pilot. That doesn’t mean the game is boring or not challenging, it means that it’s so entertaining that I forget myself. The other reason I find that I die is because I try to do something I shouldn’t like cut back quickly to get a bomb or nova, or daringly zoom between two fast-closing enemies only to have my thumb slightly off target or slip off the stick. Perhaps I need to dig out my kontrol freak thumbstick cover for this game.
There are two ways to play, Waves and Challenges. Waves gives you eight levels of progressively more difficult waves of enemies to allow you to score as many points as you can to reach the online leaderboards. After a lot of ’try and try again’ I managed number 50 on the Global leaderboard which made me quite happy.
