I downloaded Switchball today and paid far, far too much for it.  It's worth about as much as Frogger Returns, which is also now available from the PSN.  Back in the day, I loved Marble Blast Ultra and have been pining for a game that fills its void.  Switchball, sadly, is not it.  Its unpolished graphics feel too PlayStation 2 while the music lies somewhere between the sound of a bad Casio keyboard played moderately well and the soundtrack of the final scene in a 1996 gay porn film where the protagonist has had loads of one-night stands and has finally found 'the one'.  They fall in love, they kiss, they fuck.  The film didn't do well, so they're making what they can by selling the rights to the music to Swedish games development companies.

The dodgy graphics quietly try to get something across to you in that awkward way that while at the table during your boss's respectful dinner-party, your other half tries to indicate that some of the compote has dribbled down your chin.  What it's trying to tell you is that the camera sucks.  There are three modes for the camera.  It sucks in all of them.  This is quite some accomplishment.  It sucked in the XBLA version, of which this is a port, but it sucks more on the PS3 on account of there being no option to un-invert the X-axis.  You can toggle the inversion of the Y, but not the X, which means it feels like flying an aircraft sideways. 

For your six-pounds-something, you get 30 levels of varying awkward challenges with clunky physics puzzles, some timing elements and of course the whole premise of the game, morphing your ball into a few other kinds of balls with different properties.  This allows you to go and play with magnets, move heavier obstacles and perform jumps to overcome the bizarre floating weirdness of your surroundings so that you can get to your da Vinci machine and fly yourself somewhere else equally strange.

If, for some reason you're not playing Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Heavy Rain or any of the other triple-A releases to grace this and other gaming platforms at the moment, you might want to persist with Switchball and actually get into it.  If this is the case, then well done you.  I played it for quite some time on the XBLA version, giving it a fair chance to tickle my fancy and it didn't.  I concluded it was a bad game and let it sink into the sludge of my mind, where it met the dance moves to Tongue Tied from series two of Red Dwarf and how to undertake differentiation.

Why, you might ask, did I buy the poxy game again, if I didn't like it the first time around?  Well, that's a good question and my answer is simple.  The sludge of my mind enveloped it so completely that I didn't even recognise the game or the art, not a single glimmer of recognition sparked in my mind until I actually began playing, whereby I immediately concluded that the only thing worse than a bad game is a bad port of a bad game.