 The NES has its fair share of bad arcade ports, but Marble Madness is not one of them. On paper this game sounds pretty dull, but it's one of the best versus multiplayer games on the NES. You're just racing with marbles, there's not really any enemies or anything like that. Your obstacles are the course itself and the time limit, not to mention your own clumsiness. You can of course play by yourself as well, but instead of racing the computer opponent, you're just racing the clock. The quicker you finish one stage, the more time gets added onto the next stage, so there's always an incentive for finishing with a quicker time. It's all very simple, except for the controls, which are kinda strange and hard to get used to. It's easy to hate on the controls at first for feeling stiff and awkward, but after a while I began to realize I'm not really sure how else you could implement something like this from an isometric viewpoint. It's all based on feel, and either you get it or you just don't. What's weird is that the game itself seems unsure of itself about the controls and covers its bases by providing two control options, 45 degrees and 90 degrees. 90 degrees is the default option and works fine, but the 45 degree option is bizarre. It just shifts the d-pad 45 degrees, so pressing down moves you down and to the right, pressing up moves you up and to the left and so on. It's super weird and not intuitive, it's easier to just use the 90 degree option which just reflects the d-pad as it is. There's a couple other idiosyncrasies here, notably in two player mode, where if one player gets too far ahead of the other, the player left behind gets warped ahead, but is penalized 5 seconds. Again, I'm guessing technical limitations meant that they couldn't really do a split screen for this game, so this is likely just the best they could put together at the time. As it is now, it's a little disorienting and kind of annoying. I mean, if you really fall behind and the guy ahead just keeps going, you're just kind of in limbo, and that's pretty stupid. Another idiosyncrasy is this magic wand that shows up and grants you some extra time. I really have no idea how or why this happens, it just does. So whatever. There's only six levels here, so the game is pretty short. Really this game is so tough and so focused and intense that anything longer probably would have made my head explode. Marble Madness is very tough and subsequently very frustrating. I think that's because this game looks like it should be somewhat easy. I mean, you're just a marble rolling around, there's no enemies or anything, how hard could it be? Well, the answer is spike the controller on the ground and rage quit kind of hard. So yeah, Marble Madness is the ultimate rental game. It's worth a rental to see if you can get the hang of the controls, or if it's just not for you. The game certainly isn't bad, but it's all about feel, and if that feel agrees with you then you'll love this game. It does everything else well, like the graphics and music and the two player mode while flawed is really fun and majorly intense. Marble Madness is at the very least worth trying out at least once.