Dear Readers, welcome to our live coverage of Winter Games! The organisers could not have chosen a better day for the event: Look at that Čerenkov blue sky, ever so slightly marred by small cloudy squares of brilliant white! The sight is even clear enough to catch a glimpse of the far away Purple Peaks.
Just now a runner enters the stadium with the Olympic torch and climbs the steps up to light the fire. But what‘s that? His skin is blue with cold! Has nobody told that poor man that a sleeveless shirt might be a little bit too much on the cool side? Now the Epyx-fire blazes up and the white doves are set free. Endless swarms of them fly over the crowds in this grandest of opening ceremonies.
Speedball, and even more so its sequel Brutal Deluxe, had been big, influential hits. Other games applying a similar style to basic (or, to give it a more positive spin, proven and trusted) concepts of the sports genre started flooding the market. One of these copycat games is Stormball which goes as far as almost copying the player portraits verbatim.
The sport presented here is a simplistic ball game where two players (two human opponents or one against a computer-controlled one) try to throw the ball into certain scoring zones before it is bounced back from the invisible walls or the arena while obviously trying to prevent the opponent from doing the same. Any kind of body contact is not possible; rather, both players need to stay on their own side of the pitch. So gliding left or right to catch the ball and then throwing it at just the right angle to hit the targets while avoiding the other player's attempts to block it is key.
The idea of clowns shooting each other up with seesaws and trampolines is not new. The theme has appeared in arcades since the 70s and has also been transferred to various home consoles. In the 8-bit realm, Comic Circus is by far the best version I know of. However, the console called Super Cassette Vision, which is almost only known in Japan, also came to a tiny degree of fame in Europe through a temporary export collaboration with France. Despite the name Super Cassette Vision, by the way, modules were used as the carrier medium.
