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7.8 excellent
The next time a neighbor traps you into a boring conversation about something like the history of baseball cards, change the topic to Bound Around. This is one of those games where a family of tennis balls has been kidnapped by the insect army, and their only hope is you - playing as the sole tennis ball that escaped capture.
Your character, named Yello (oh yeah), was out playing tennis when the insect army came and took his family away. (The tennis ball family should have installed screens.) Now Yello must venture into Insect Land and find enough magic stars to free his poor family. There are 160 stars in total, each hidden in a dangerous puzzle room filled with colored blocks... and usually a few insects, too. If you hate colored blocks as much as I do, you probably unconsciously began clenching your fists as soon as I mentioned them. Relax, because Bound Around will give you plenty of opportunities to destroy these pesky blocks. Only by removing all of them from a room can Yello receive a magic star. That's the number one rule in Insect Land.
Bound Around, by Karl Hofer, is an arcade/puzzle hybrid and a Crillion clone. Yello constantly bounces up and down, only reversing direction when he hits an obstacle. You can control his side to side movement but you can't stop his upward and downward movement. As a tennis ball, his natural color is yellow. He can break apart any yellow blocks he hits, but he can't harm non-yellow blocks unless he changes to their color. (So to break purple blocks, he must become purple. Otherwise he just bounces off them.) Yello can change his color by bouncing against special color switches. Already you can imagine dozens of possible puzzle scenarios involving blocks of color A forming a barrier, behind which are switches of color B. These are staple puzzles of Crillion-type games.
There are many other block types, such as deadly skull blocks. If Yello matches their color and so much as brushes up against them, he will be killed. The most common variety of skull blocks are wooden skull blocks, which kill tennis balls of any color. There are obstacles, such as doors that have to be opened by bouncing against switches with stars drawn on them. And cacti, which are safe to bounce against but can only be destroyed by ladybugs. (I'll add that to Wikipedia later.) Regular wooden blocks cannot be destroyed no matter what color Yello is.
There are one-way doors and teleporters, and apples that roll when you hit them and explode if they fall onto something! Don't bounce too close to a falling apple in Bound Around, or you'll be caught in the fireball. Once I stopped at a McDonalds drive through and got one of their delicious cherry pies. I was driving home when I bit into it, and it exploded in my face! How can a McDonalds cherry pie explode like that?! I still don't understand it. I mean, how is it even possible? It literally exploded. I almost drove off the road, and my face was burnt.
Other special blocks are ice blocks that freeze Yello so that he can't control his bouncing until he hits a warmer surface, mud that he has to dig through, marble bombs (just as explosive as apples except they don't roll - very odd because I expected marbles to roll better than apples), and special heart blocks. The heart blocks temporarily change Yello into a small, tough skittle ball which can break apart any one block, including wooden obstacle blocks.
As you might expect, Insect Land is full of insects. Miss Bee is a cute bee that flies back and forth. She won't chase Yello, but she'll sting him if he gets too close. Ladybugs walk in circles along the walls, and explode when they touch cacti. Scary animated Halloween jack-o-lanterns destroy any blocks in their path. Pelicans drop bombs. Spiked metallic blocks move back and forth, until they spot Yello, in which case they rush in his direction. And finally, colored munchers eat any blocks painted the same color as themselves. Note: Not all of these enemies are actually insects. All are deadly to Yello.
If I had to choose just one excellent movie scene about tennis, I'd choose the one in Blow-up.
Like most Crillion clones, it can sometimes be tedious bouncing back and forth breaking lots of blocks, because you spend a lot of time waiting for the ball to travel across the screen. And with every broken block the distance between the remaining blocks and the wall increases. You can speed up Yello's movement, thankfully.
The graphics of Bound Around are very simple and old school, with few special effects to throw you out of your chair. Insect Land looks a bit like a cuter version of Super Mario Brothers, except with many, many doors. All Yello has to do is bounce onto a door and he'll open it and enter the puzzle inside. You can restart a puzzle room as often as you like, and for quite a few of the puzzles the order in which you destroy certain blocks or interact with certain insects are as critical as your arcade ball-bouncing skills... so you will be restarting numerous times. Tiny mistakes can be fatal, and I think the game should have ramped up a bit more slowly. The difficulty of some of the early puzzles might scare away beginners who aren't passionate about smashing colored blocks. I mean, saving the tennis ball family.