The game stars a cast of balls with faces and a grappling arm, who must climb their way up to the top of various towers... for the honor of getting to be the one to destroy them. Along the way they encounter a wide variety of obstacles, enemies, platforming challenges, and of course, the other racers.
This Game contains examples of:
- All There in the Manual: There is a plot to the game, as basic as it is. The tracks the players race are called the Sacred Towers, which are the works of the Cho-Dama Kingdom. The purpose and function of the towers are unknown beyond looking pretty cool and Iggy invited his friends to race over who gets to blow them up. The various traps and enemies are the inhabitants of the kingdom trying to stop Iggy and his friends who are collectively known as the Iggy's Reckin' Balls.
- Artificial Stupidity: Sometimes the AI characters get stuck in a loop when trying to navigate relatively simple obstacles, preventing them from making any progress. Consecutive Drop-Swing Jumps in particular tend to stone-wall them.
- Big Boo's Haunt: The glowing lights adorning the trees in Tiki Woods give off a haunted appearance.
- Boss Rush: The bonus world, Iggy's Challenge, is comprised of the final tracks from the previous nine worlds.
- Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: Falling (or getting thrown) off the track results in Evan the dragonfly coming to your rescue, and depositing you back at the place you were last on the track.
- Butt-Monkey: Whoever comes in fourth gets caught in the end-race explosions. The fourth-place character at the end of a Grand Prix gets Goomba Stomped at the prize ceremony.
- Camera Abuse: If a swinging hammer knocks the character toward the screen, they hit the "screen" and slide down it with a humorous noise. Strangely, this noise will still occur if AI racers get hit by the hammers, suggesting they have their own screens to run into.
- Counter-Attack: If grappled by an enemy racer, you can reverse the attack and grapple them instead with good timing. This doesn't, however, work on the circle-throw.
- Cultural Translation: For the Japanese release, many of the characters were made "cuter" (such as Iggy himself being given bigger puppy-dog eyes) and a lot of the gloomy graphics were brightened.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The Funkville towers are all in black-and-white.
- Distaff Counterpart: Iggy’s girlfriend, Lizzy.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Easy difficulty ends the game at World 4, and Medium ends the game at World 6. Only if you set it to Hard does it go all the way to World 9, plus Iggy's Challenge. Downplayed in that the game never actually insults the player, but instead leaves an encouraging message to try it at a harder difficulty.
- Eternal Engine: Tektricity. More specifically, this set of towers is located inside of a massive computer.
- Everything is Big in Texas: While all the balls are about the same size, the Texan-themed T'basco's longhorns make him appear much larger than the other racers.
- Elvis Impersonator: King Jr. He even grapples with a microphone.
- Evil Laugh: Whether they are actually evil or not is difficult to tell with so little characterization, but both Narlie and Skully get some pretty good evil laughter. Narlie's is more low-pitched and menacing, while Skully's is a high-pitched cackle.
- Extendable Arms: Every character who uses a part of their anatomy to grapple rather than a device. Rob-Ert in particular gets the Telescoping Robot treatment.
- Faceless Eye: I-Ball in a nutshell. The fact that he appears to grapple with a spear heightens the creepy factor.
- Floating Platforms: All of the towers are made of inexplicably flying platforms.
- Goomba Stomp: An effective attack on enemy racers: it stops them dead in their tracks for a couple of seconds and gives you a significant height boost, potentially allowing a shortcut. It is not very effective on enemies, however: you're more likely to suffer Collision Damage or bounce off awkwardly.
- Green Hill Zone: Patchwork, which is a field of flowers that look like cut felt. Patchwork is atypical of video game worlds with a garden theme, however, in that Patchwork is the eighth world, the penultimate one in the game.
- Grimy Water: All towers are floating above some kind of grimy-looking liquid that harms your character on contact and causes them to jump multiple stories straight up. Deliberately falling in at the beginning of the race can actually give you a brief speed boost over the competition on some courses, especially since it even propels you through armored platforms.
- Harmless Freezing: The Freeze powerup traps everyone else in blocks of ice. This just slows them down a bit (especially when grappling) and it shatters a few seconds later. Or you can use up a Nitro Boost to break out instantly.
- Homing Projectile: The red and yellow attack items. The red one will home in on one character, the yellow will home in on and attack multiple characters in sequence (sometimes multiple times). They can be avoided by ducking, which confuses their homing and causes them to seek other targets.
- Hurricane of Puns: Much of the dialogue from some characters. Sno-eee constantly makes references to "cool", Sonny does the same with "hot", and I-Ball's victory statement is "I'm a true visionary!"
- A fair number of course names are puns as well ("Fan-tastick!", a tower with an emphasis on fans, to name just one example).
- Interface Screw: The "Reverse" item, which inverts the directional controls of everyone except the one who uses it.
- Invincibility Power-Up: The star, naturally. Beyond the obvious advantages of being invincible, it also allows you to grapple through armored platforms, which can make it a
Game-Breaker on certain towers. Fortunately, it is the rarest power-up by far. - Invincible Minor Minion: The yellow guys. They can't actually hurt you, but you will bounce off of them quite effectively. They also cannot be grappled, unlike the hoppers or the spinies.
- It's All Upstairs From Here: Iggy's Reckin' Balls is made entirely of this trope.
- Level Ate: Candy Lane. The towers are made of candy canes and have random other candies jutting out of them. The mountains also have icing at their peaks instead of snow, and they all have cherries on top.
- The Lost Woods: Tiki Woods, combined with a haunted theme.
- Marathon Level: Towers from around the middle of World 8 and onwards will have you complete only 2 laps instead of the usual three (except for Enchilada Baby and The Beach, which are 1 lap each). They are still some of the longest races in the game anyway.
- Mercy Invincibility: After getting hurt by just about anything, the characters is invincible for a few seconds. Any offensive items they run into simply disappear.
- Metronomic Man Mashing: If you grapple an enemy or another racer, you can do this to them, including multiple times in a row. Beware of Counter Attacks though...
- Ninja: Mask. He uses a shuriken on a chain as a grapple.
- Nitro Boost: Each racer gets four boosts a race, which cause them to rocket forward at extreme speed and plow through any enemies and players they pass. Uses for them are rather limited though, given the primarily vertical direction in which the races proceed. Boosts are recharged each lap, through use of an item, or by Button Mashing 'A' on auto-Turbo sections of track.
- No Plot? No Problem!: There is zero explanation why all these bizarre characters are racing on towers to tear them down beyond a single paragraph in the manual stating that the towers are the works of the "Cho-Dama Kingdom" and the cast are racing over who gets to blow them up.
- Pain-Powered Leap: Touching that dangerous liquid below each tower causes your character to leap up a considerable distance in pain.
- Palette Swap: Except for the ponytails, Lizzy is simply a blue Iggy. She even has the same voice lines, simply pitched up (except in the Japanese version where she gets her own voice actress).
- Palmtree Panic: Soft Sun Bay. Unlike most examples, this is not the first set of stages, but the fourth.
- Power Floats: Sonny, Rob-Ert, and En-Tee-I all hover above the track rather than bounce along it. However, they are not any faster than the other racers.
- Punny Name: A number of racers, such as Sonny (a sun) or I-Ball (an eyeball).
- Shifting Sand Land: Sun Canyon. A Grand Canyon-like place.
- Shout-Out: Skully sounds amazingly like The Cryptkeeper.
- Funkville's background pays heavy homage to the works of M.C. Escher, particularly "House of Stairs."
- Iggy himself is probably one, since (aside from being a little round ball...thing) he looks just like Iguana Entertainment's iguana mascot. Plus the name: Iggy, iguana...get it?
- Skyscraper City: Downtown. A rather surreal example as the skyscrapers jut out at weird angles.
- Spiteful A.I.: The other racers will be much more likely to attack you if you have attacked them in the past (this applies to other AI as well, not just the player).
- Stuff Blowing Up: The tower is annihilated in a series of explosions once the race is over. If you are the winner, you get to push The Button that sets it off.
- Teleportation with Drawbacks: Teleporters are one device that can appear on the track. Some of them are conditional: enter when the arrow is up, and you're good. Enter when the arrow is down, and they will take you backwards.
- Totally Radical: The entire game is filled with such utterances, but the style is rather tongue-in-cheek and suggests this was intentional.
- Under the Sea: The Deep. It isn’t an exaggeration, you start at the bottom of a very murky sea.
- The Unintelligible: Chatter, Rob-Ert, and En-Tee-I cannot speak, and make noises appropriate to their character (teeth chattering, robot beeps, and alien-sounding squeaks, respectively).
- Villain Protagonist: Based on the scant story information provided, Iggy and his friends are doing what is basically large scale vandalism of culturally important monuments. The game never attempts to justify what they're doing either.
- Violation of Common Sense: On some towers, you're best off intentionally dropping into the toxic fluid at the beginning of the race and of each lap, since your character's leap upwards in pain will let them quickly pass through any platform, including armored ones. On Hard difficulty, the AI will do this too, so there's no reason not to if the opportunity presents itself.
- Wackyland: Funkville and Patchwork, both of which have an art motif with their environmental motif coming secondary as a castle and a flower garden, respectively.
