How many balls does it take to make a man happy? Well, normally I would say that two is sufficient. However, in this case, I dare say that 100 Balls satisfy my needs and then more! Okay, enough with the double entendre. If you didn't get the hidden joke in there, it's okay. After all, I am not here to give you a lesson on the male anatomy. I am here to tell you about a little gem of a game called 100 Balls.
You can be forgiven for not having heard of it before. I know it hasn't received much attention in the Android community. It did peak highly in the iOS charts for free games recently, so I did what any good game reviewer will do. I looked for it in the Google Play Store. Lo and behold, typical for anything on the Play Store, there are 100 different clones of the game available for your perusal. Now, the developer that brought the game to iOS is Giedrius Talzunas, but do a search for that name on the Play Store and you will find no results. So, I will just tell you about the one that I downloaded, and that I think resembles the iOS game the most, which is 100 Balls+ from Peach Fuzz Software. (Dear developer, you can thank me later for endorsing your clone.)
The premise of the game is simple, and one that anyone will get after 1 minute of playing without reading a lengthy manual. You are given 100 balls at the start and you have to drop them into 8 cups that are constantly revolving around the screen. If a ball drops outside of a cup, that ball is lost forever and you are left with 99 balls. If a cup goes by without a ball dropped in it, the cup will be lost forever and you are left with 7 cups. So the cycle continues until you either run out of balls or you run out of cups.
Each time the first cup goes a full revolution, the difficulty level will go up and the cups move faster. You are given 1 point for each ball dropped in a white cup. Later on in the game, the cups will change to a different colour. Balls dropped in a coloured cup will turn into that colour and will award you with higher points (depending on the colour) when dropped into the next cup. Phew, that was a mouthful!
The game exudes a similar addictive pattern to something like Flappy Bird. It hinges on a trial and error basis, and emphasizes high scores and multiplayer leaderboards in a how-far-can-you-go competitive nature. However, don't be fooled by its simple premise. There is definitely more to it than simply dropping balls into cups. Besides nailing the timing of the drop (which gets increasingly difficult as time goes on), you have to also consider how many balls to drop into which cups. For example, if you drop all available balls into one cup, you will not have any for the next one, and that cup will disappear. If you distribute the number of balls evenly so that every cup gets a share, you will have less balls going into the coloured cup.
So it is definitely a game that encourages you to think on your feet and find that middle ground. Do you want to get a higher score, or get a higher level? Do you feel more manageable playing with less cups (you can survive indefinitely with only one cup)? How do you cope with the increasing speed of the cups?
Of course, you can sign in to all the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to compare and share scores. It's also definitely a game that can spark a conversation by the water cooler or get everyone around the table playing at the same time while waiting for lunch to be served at a restaurant. Whatever the reason, the game is totally free on the Play Store, so I suggest picking this up.
