Marble Blast - The Revival

We are currently testing our new design for MarbleBlast.net so you may encounter problems while browsing.

We have recently received news from Bad Habit Software regarding Marble Blast Ultra’s new map packs. They will be rolled out on XBL Marketplace on the 3rd and 24th of December - just in time for Christmas!

When we first played Marble Blast Gold years ago, it was an instant addiction. It was one of those games you kept coming back to no matter what. More recently, its sequel arrived in the form of Marble Blast Ultra. Aside from the fact that it was released for the Xbox 360, it had huge graphical improvements not to mention it ran natively in high definition. Marble Blast Ultra was and still is hugely popular. It’s still in the top 10 most played XBLA games to this day. Sadly, due to a select few individuals the leaderboards mean absolutely nothing. Due to a glitch which some are taking advantage of, people are now able to obtain top times for levels they do not even need to complete.

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It has been a very long wait but the wait is now over. Our hard work has finally paid off. You heard it here first (hopefully), the Marble Blast Ultra update is coming! The update includes all of the new maps that you see on Marble Blast Online at InstantAction. That is Playground, Marble It Up!, Bowl, Blast Club, Concentric (in place of Core), Promontory, Spires, Triumvirate, Vortex Effect, Ziggurat.

If you’ve never played these maps before, you can read an overview of them here.

Not only will we be getting the new maps, we will also be getting more Achievements worth 50 gamerpoints which will be tied in with the maps! Leaderboards will not be reset, this update only contains minor bug fixes.

Watch our trailer for the upcoming Marble Blast Ultra map pack below. We accidently missed out Concentric, sorry!

Don’t want to watch it on YouTube? Download the High Definition version here.

As you all know by now, we created this website to make the update happen. It still didn’t end up happening, even with the hundreds of petition signatures we got on our forum. However, something better happened, InstantAction was made allowing everyone who didn’t have an Xbox 360 to be able to now play Marble Blast Ultra (now named Marble Blast Online) with all the new updates and experience the fun.

We eventually got bored of rolling around in one map for several hours and ended up thinking of new ways to bring more fun to MBU, not a gametype, not tricks, but to hack the game so we can get access to the files. We thought we’d just share this.

We coded a program that could open up a file named “marble.bza”, this was the core MBU file which had everything packed inside it. Our program worked, so we extracted all the files within that core file. However, the problem we had was to rebuild this “marble.bza” file and keep its signature encryption the same but due to Xbox Live now being so secure we couldn’t, otherwise we would’ve been able to edit the files and then play MBU, so instead we just played around with the files to see what really went into making MBU. Below are a few pictures for your interest.

Interesting things we found:

• Unused Sound files (some used for MBP, such as tim_trance)
• Unused Images
• Some useless coding
• Some things we can’t share

All I get is this lousy error message saying the forum does not exist.

We’re sorry! We didn’t get rid of our forums on purpose! A few months ago we had to move our entire website to a new server, this meant we had to change a lot of things to get it up and running. However, we forgot to make a backup of our latest forum database (very stupid of us, we know). As you have seen we run phpBB forum software. We had a backup but it was from an older version of phpBB, so it was almost impossible (we still tried!) for us to import it into the latest version of phpBB released to date. We deeply apologize for this as we know a lot of you had some very interesting discussions including, top times, routes, custom content and much more. Again, we’re sorry!

This does not mean we will not have a forum any more, we have decided to use the Marble Blast Online section within the InstantAction forum. We hope everyone from our community will start to post there and maybe also get involved with the whole forum!

We look forward to seeing you there.