Tero plays GEN Cyberball Part 1

Part 1 of a few games of Cyberball for Genesis, played on hard mode with no save states. Playlist start at:    • Tero plays GEN Cyberball Part 1   Visit my website at
for more of my videos. One of the best things about the GAB Project (a ratings topic I administer on Gamefaqs) is that it forces me to play games I might have otherwise overlooked. As you can probably tell from a quick look at the load screen for this movie, the graphics in Cyberball are rather lacking. The animation looks like something you'd expect to see in an NES game, and the field detail could almost pass for generation 2. Despite the first impression of low production values, however, there's actually a good game underneath. Cyberball is basically a football version of Base Wars, which means it's a crazy and not quite accurate sports game featuring robots. First of all, rather than playing with a ball, you play with a bomb, which gradually ticks down to kaboom unless you can defuse it by crossing the 50 yard line or scoring a touchdown. If it blows up, whomever was holding the ball is destroyed, which can actually be useful in some circumstances. Your robot players also have a certain level of durability, as they get sacked they'll progressively take damage, and if they take too much they'll eventually blow up and fumble the ball. You can spend money (that you earn by making offensive progress) to repair your players, but if you let them get totally destroyed you don't have to pay, so there's kind of a weird risk reward mechanic there. You'll also want to save some money for upgrades if you can, as they make your team a lot more powerful. Despite the inherent craziness of this setup, this is actually an extremely fundamentals-heavy football game. Unlike almost all other football games, defense is realistically strong here, and on many plays you will struggle to gain yardage. You have to be vigilant on defense, though, because if you leave a man open it can very easily lead to a touchdown. You have to read plays extremely fast (your QB gets sacked almost instantly on some plays) and make good snap decisions in order to avoid getting overwhelmed. It took me quite a while to get good enough to keep up with the "hard" difficutly setting, simply because your QB gets rushed so fast here and one mistake is basically an instant touchdown. I still can't believe I threw that interception at the start of game 2, I was so sure that pass was good I was already running for the endzone before I noticed it had been picked off. If I could ever afford that quarterback upgrade I'm sure this would be a lot easier, but the first few games are brutal.