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Marble Madness 2: Marble Man


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1 hour ago, ubersaurus said:

No idea why it got posted with no fanfare back on May 21 (and no one noticed until yesterday) but my *best* guess is that whoever owns that specific board the dump is from decided they were fine with posting it online.

It's kinda like many people (and myself) said before. If something isn't available and is being lorded over you, interest is lost. A sour taste builds up dampening enthusiasm. People move on and play stuff that's actually available. The window of interest formed by hype and talk only lasts so long.

 

Not only that, there's the aging demographic. The 80's arcades are not as popular as they once were. Things are even moving to the post-NES sweet nostalgic spot.

 

We've got all the stuff at home, if we want to play it.. And MMII is just another game in MAME's list now. "Retro" and things retro was a good run and had great market timing.

Edited by Keatah
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33 minutes ago, Keatah said:

It's kinda like many people (and myself) said before. If something isn't available and is being lorded over you, interest is lost. A sour taste builds up dampening enthusiasm. People move on and play stuff that's actually available. The window of interest formed by hype and talk only lasts so long.

 

Not only that, there's the aging demographic. The 80's arcades are not as popular as they once were. Things are even moving to the post-NES sweet nostalgic spot.

 

We've got all the stuff at home, if we want to play it.. And MMII is just another game in MAME's list now. "Retro" and things retro was a good run and had great market timing.

I'll admit I'm not as excited about this as I would have been 10-15 years ago.  It's still neat to see, but I doubt I'll ever actually get around to playing it.

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2 hours ago, ubersaurus said:

As far as I'm aware it matches the play video that went up a few months ago but is different from the build shown at California Extreme. And yeah, as said, the dump dates go back to 2000, so likely this build was dumped back then and just had the rom held privately until now.

 

No idea why it got posted with no fanfare back on May 21 (and no one noticed until yesterday) but my *best* guess is that whoever owns that specific board the dump is from decided they were fine with posting it online.

you can't do anything with just the rom files.

 

mamehaze has been putting out videos, and making the driver file work and

posting the builds only several hours ago.

 

kind of hard to try it out without that.

--

 

it's interesting to note that there is a 2 player option in there.

so it can be made to work with just 2 players only also.

 

later

-1

Edited by negative1
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quick marble madness 2 review QA report

levels could be redesigned to be easier and not spam gimmicks all of the time 
trackball controls need to be reimplemented in the game 
enemies need to be rebalanced 

 

overall 5/10 
it is mostly good like the graphics and music
it's just that it has major flaws in other areas like balancing and level design alongside controls

Edited by gobert3794
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1 hour ago, negative1 said:

it's interesting to note that there is a 2 player option in there.

so it can be made to work with just 2 players only also.

Not like it works with 3 players at all in MAME... for some reason there's absolutely no way to map anything to the "3 player start" button, so player 3 can never be activated.

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1 hour ago, gobert3794 said:

quick marble madness 2 review QA report

levels could be redesigned to be easier and not spam gimmicks all of the time 
trackball controls need to be reimplemented in the game 
enemies need to be rebalanced 

 

overall 5/10 
it is mostly good like the graphics and music
it's just that it has major flaws in other areas like balancing and level design alongside controls

there's 5 difficulty settings.

 

so why would you want to make it easier?

 

for people that mastered the first one. anything more challenging is better.

and having several much longer levels with a lot more design elements is

beyond the basic simplicity of the first one.

 

basically it all comes down to the controls.

which most likely will be fixed.

 

i'm not saying this is a better game, it's just more of what I expect a sequel to be.

 

later

-1

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14 hours ago, gobert3794 said:

quick marble madness 2 review QA report

levels could be redesigned to be easier and not spam gimmicks all of the time

I was messing with the service options and set it to the easiest. Forgot that I did that. And blew through the levels with only a continue here and there.

 

Yes there are a lot of gimmicks. Not sure I like all the busy-ness going on, and the guideposts kinda seem babyish. But I do like the levels more than the original because there's less "tightrope" action, less opportunity to keep falling into the abyss.

 

12 hours ago, Place Logo Here said:

Which versions of MAME have been confirmed as working for MMII?

I consider it all pretty new and let's give it a revision or two to get going. Right now it seems the custom build mentioned a few posts back is the only way to play. But it is on Wintel machines today.

Edited by Keatah
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16 hours ago, Tempest said:

I'll admit I'm not as excited about this as I would have been 10-15 years ago.

Absolutely. It would be nostalgic (for me) today if it came out in an earlier version of MAME, sometime right after dotcom era. That's when I was ramping up and adding games with gusto.

 

Maybe it was released now in order to drum up interest in the full-size cabinets?

 

16 hours ago, Tempest said:

It's still neat to see, but I doubt I'll ever actually get around to playing it.

Sure you will. Most all of us here will.

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4 hours ago, Keatah said:

Sure you will. Most all of us here will.

I watched the playthrough online and that was good enough for me.  I'd definitely try it if it shows up at a convention though.  To be honest it doesn't look all that fun in its current unbalanced state.

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4 hours ago, Tempest said:

I watched the playthrough online and that was good enough for me. 

Some games all you need to do is see the levels, and you can call it a day. MMII is similar because the game is majorly about level-design.

 

Either that or just the general hype and build-up. No matter how good something is, the hype and tension release can make it seem just blahh.

 

4 hours ago, Tempest said:

To be honest it doesn't look all that fun in its current unbalanced state.

What would need to change to make it balanced?

 

7 hours ago, gobert3794 said:

just learned the most mame builds in this thread are 7mhz rather the original 16mhz of the arcade machine.

I thought something was wrong from the immediate get-go. Ha!

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3 hours ago, gobert3794 said:

marble madness 2 apparently runs on the atari batman game hardware but just with a different memory map 
so anyone with a knowledge of code and arcade conversion kits could turn a batman cabinet into a marble madness 2 cabinet potentially 

While Batman didn't have a dedicated cab albeit I've been told there were a few prototypes in the smaller Tetris, Schuzz caberet cabs, the other big hurdle is Batman boardsets are quite rare (1k) and very expensive. I believe the last one on KLOV went for north of $400.

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2 hours ago, schuwalker said:

While Batman didn't have a dedicated cab albeit I've been told there were a few prototypes in the smaller Tetris, Schuzz caberet cabs, the other big hurdle is Batman boardsets are quite rare (1k) and very expensive. I believe the last one on KLOV went for north of $400.

sweet mother of jesus that's a massive turnoff for me right there 
surprised atari didn't produce more of their batman game but yet again they released it in 1991 so the movie was basically irrelevant to most as the sequel was coming soon 

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On 5/24/2022 at 1:52 PM, Rik1138 said:

Didn't want to wait any more, here's an uber-tiny MAME build that only plays Marble Madness II (Didn't want to wait hours to build all of MAME...)

https://we.tl/t-8TF9hKlIZK

 

No ROMs, get them from the Archive, put them in a ROMS folder...  :)

Strange. I dropped the roms into a ROMS folder with this, but it's not found.


EDIT: Got it, had to rename them to what it was looking for. Thanks.

 

 

Edited by R.Cade
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WOW, after 20 years trying to get a chance to play this game... Looking up every few months for news... TONIGHT, I actually got to play this game and although it is more challenging than the first one (I do own the OG coin op of Marble Madness), it's got the same feel and WOW, I actually got to play in my life time...

 

This is one game I never thought I would be able to play.... 

 

For those wondering... Custom Mame, Used a Xbox One controller to play it, and it worked well...

Edited by TheCoolDave
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On 5/24/2022 at 1:39 PM, Tempest said:

I'll admit I'm not as excited about this as I would have been 10-15 years ago.  It's still neat to see, but I doubt I'll ever actually get around to playing it.

I actually have to agree that this pretty much sums up my opinion as well. And never mind MAME, I didn’t even bother playing the actual arcade cabinets at the last show. I just walked passed them.

 

I wasn’t really a huge fan of the first game. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. So more of it doesn’t really matter to me. I think the big MM fans will enjoy it, but that’s about it.

 

I think the lesson in all this or better said the thing to take from all of this is that the grass always looks greener on the other side. We tend to want what we can’t have or even just what we don’t have. But what we do already have is almost always just as good, if not better.

 

Video games are fun. That’s why we all got into them when we were kids. And we have thousands of them to play and enjoy for the rest of our lives. So getting hung up over the hundreds that never were is rather pointless.

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