Simple glossy balls in Blender internal renderer I'm trying to make a bunch of balls bouncing around, and I want them to look really glossy and plastic/toy-like, using Blender Render.

I made a plane emitting light above the balls, to make a shiny rectangle on all balls, which looks pretty good, but the balls are all reflecting each other, so it looks kind of stupid like the image below. 

How can I make balls, and other plastic objects that look glossy without making them reflect each other and still look shiny/glossy?

I guess I would need to fake reflections somehow?
I think you should simply find a better balance between the "mirror" and the "specular" function of the material, as picture 1.



If you really want to fake the reflections, you could render the previous scene, then render only balls, lights and white reflective plane over a transparent background, unchecking the "traceable" option of the material (this will delete the cross reflection between balls, but shadows also will disappear); then composite the two images: floor and shadows from the first render, balls with no cross-reflections from the second (you will miss the shadows of balls over others balls).
This method works also for animation movies.