Question Of The Week [October 29th 2025]

Q: What Was Your Favorite Xbox Live Arcade Game?

A: Marble Blast Ultra. Yes, there are many other Xbox Live Arcade games that I could choose to pick, like Geometry Wars, Castle Crashers or Braid, I will always go back in my mind to this little marble game, a genre not really touched on much in gaming.

Marble Blast Ultra combined a childhood love of Marbles with my main hobby, video games to give me a modern and much more in depth and fully fleshed out version of Marble Madness. While the original 1982 Marble Madness game only contained 5 levels and didn’t have much more than get from the start to the end, avoiding obstacles, Marble Blast Ultra allowed the ball that I controlled to jump and move around the playfield that twisted and turned. Powerups also added a huge improvement to the overall creativity of the massive 60 levels.

Navigating the levels was a feat in and of itself, but it also had a “par time” to beat. I ended up spending way more time than I normally would have trying to get the best times, but this was just a couple months into the Xbox 360’s life and one of the earliest Xbox 360’s Live Arcade games. Looking back on it all these years later, it was baffling that there was never a sequel to it. It did get a DLC pack a couple years later at least, and the hidden Easter Eggs were a fun diversion too.

Sadly the developer and publisher had a bit of a falling out and had some disputes to retain the right for a sequel, which ultimately ended up forcing the developer to close up. Years later, a little game called Marble It Up rolled onto the Nintendo Switch and really was the sequel that I always wanted. Giving a bit of modern feeling and even some swanky new gravity mechanics, it allowed me to relive those early Live Arcade days. It even got ported to Steam with a bunch of new content in a package called Marble Blast Ultra.