Ballance

Ballance is a puzzle game from 2004 published by Atari; the developer field is empty in this record. The principle is easy to describe and hard to execute: you guide a ball along narrow tracks suspended over nothing and try not to send it over the edge.

The central idea is that the ball changes material. Wood is balanced, stone is heavy and stubborn, paper is light enough to be pushed around by a jet of air. At marked points the material swaps and the player must immediately change driving style — what is safe as stone becomes a fall as paper, and the other way round.

There are no enemies and no conventional timer. All the difficulty comes from physics and from how precisely you can steer a rolling object. At a time when the market was driven by action titles and online play, that made the game unusual, and it found an audience looking for something calmer but still demanding.

The record lists a single-player title for MS-DOS/PC. By 2004 real-time physics on home machines had become ordinary, which is exactly what the concept depends on — without believable weight and rebound, the whole design would fall apart.

OldGame.cz keeps a record of this puzzle game with its year, publisher and in-game images, and it is not among the browser-playable entries.