 In the game Smart Ball, you are in fact not a Smart Ball, but a jelly bean named Jerry. In fact, this game in Japan is titled Jerry Boy, made by some company named Game Freak that went on to make some sort of Pokimans series, I guess? I don't know. Anyway, Smart Ball is yet another mascot platformer for the Super Nintendo, but it does at least have its own unique slant, thanks to some of the platforming and your jelly bean form. You can scale and cling to walls and ceilings, you can attack enemies above you with this interesting upward motion, you jump on enemies and hold down on the d-pad to eliminate them, and you collect a limited number of projectiles along the way that you can use, as well as collect the letters in your name to get a couple extra lives, similar to Donkey Kong Country. Other than that, the platforming is the same old stuff you're used to from games like this, although it'll feel pretty dang slippery before you get used to it. The controls can be finicky, but I don't think there are that much of a deal breaker here. This game does cut a quick pace, and the fact that you can scale walls really helps with that. There's lots to explore here, and plenty of instances that test your ability to take advantage of wall scaling to find items or getting through sections like this here. There's eight worlds split into two stages each, no saves or passwords, but this is a pretty fast playthrough depending on how much you want to explore and find every item. And yeah, Jerry's abilities encourage you to explore a lot, but unfortunately that leads to a lot of blind jumps into pits and spikes, and that really gets annoying. My main criticism with SmartBall is that, I mean, this might as well be an NES game. From a gameplay standpoint, it's totally fine, but visually it's so bland. The only standout memorable section is where you're on the moon and the ground rotates beneath you, but otherwise, this game is wasted on the Super Nintendo. The music is okay-ish, the sound design is good enough, but the visuals are just blech. I should also talk about the story here, because I'll at least give the game credit for providing an interesting setting right off the bat with this burned down village. I mean, what's the deal with that? It's especially weird because there's no story, cutscenes, or dialogue of any kind in the game itself. But the Super Famicom version, Jerry Boy has an opening cutscene, and it was cut entirely from the North American version. It explains, very dryly, that two brothers, Jerry and Tom, ruled the land together. Jerry was going to marry someone named Emmy, and Tom got jealous and hires a wizard to turn Jerry into a jellybean. So now Jerry's gotta fight his way back in jellybean form to defeat the wizard to get his normal form back. So I guess it's implied from the destroyed village that Tom just kind of sucks as a ruler, or at least with upkeep and maintenance. Apparently this was all relegated to the instruction manual in the North American version, but I can't get a hold of one so I can't really confirm that. A bunch of other stuff was cut out, too, certain sections of certain levels and pretty much any NPC dialogue that you were supposed to come across. A sequel for the Super Famicom was practically finished but cancelled at the last minute. It's called Jelly Boy 2. There is a playable ROM out there, and this is more like it. This looks, sounds, and plays much more like a Super Nintendo game and takes advantage of the hardware. You've got six different characters to choose from this time around. With all sorts of wacky abilities, there's a world map menu where you can pick and choose what order to play everything. That's the one that's worth playing today. But just regular old vanilla smart ball for Super Nintendo? Eh, it depends on how much you like platformers like this. Sure, Jerry's jellybean form enables some interesting platforming, and I admit it's kind of interesting to see what Game Freak was up to before Pokemon came around, but the controls are slippery and tough to get used to, and like I said, this one just feels like an NES game, not to slag the NES, but I mean, I'm playing a Super Nintendo game here. The cartridge is at least a cheap pick up for under $10, and I'll grant that this game isn't bad, it's just pretty underwhelming.