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I wanted to add some additional hazards and obstacles to overcome in Sokoball, such as one way streets, pop-up barriers and floor plans that change when you cross certain floor tiles. I didn't want to force anyone to complete a series of puzzles in a specific order. In Sokoball you can play any puzzle you wish at any time. If a certain Sokoball puzzle has you stumped, give it a rest and come back to it later. In the meantime, how about solving that puzzle your co-worker created and bet you 10 bucks you couldn't solve. That's right, with Sokoball you can create your own puzzles…it comes with an Editor so you can edit and create your own diabolical puzzles for those know-it-alls you work with to solve.
In the end, Jim Radcliffe wound up with something that was closer to Chip's Challenge than to Soko-ban. It is, indeed, a tileworld. Most of the tiles you can see in the screenshot above:
- Arrow tiles can only be passed in the direction of the arrow. Like all the special tiles, you cannot push boxes across them.
- Tiles with the thick brown cross pass you through in the direction you entered them.
- Tiles with the thin green cross toggle their passability when you operate the switches.
- The switches are the light circles. They vanish after you operate them. Then, of course, you can push boxes across them.
- Tiles with the dark diamonds crumble after you pass them, with the tiles outside them sliding into their position.
- Framed black tiles are where you have to push the crates. You can pass them safely.
- But if you drop into an unframed black tile, the puzzle is reset. If you play it under XP, you have to reset it manually, I don't know why.
Most of the puzzles are extremely hard. The only ones I have solved yet are EMC2, SHEEP, and SUSHI. The latter two are taken from Soko-ban. I'm not sure whether all of them are solvable. There is one puzzle where there is no framed black tile to shove the crates into. How is that supposed to work?
The graphics are excellent. It is hard to believe at first sight that they really have only 16 colors, but it's true. Due to their fine detail they display well on large screens. I played Sokoball on a 21" TFT (it runs well under XP), and it didn't look odd or pixelated. I have played lots of hi-res VGA games, but I couldn't name one that handled this mode better. For those that would like to play classic Soko-ban with these graphics, Jim Radcliffe wrote Sokoban 1994.
The shareware version that you can download here is practically unrestricted. Only the otherwise fully functional editor lacks a few features, but you can save your levels. That is a good thing, for I doubt that you can buy the full version any more.
