Music and sounds. Open Menu, then Settings, to
turn the sounds off or on, play music while you play — ours,
or your own songs from this computer — and swap any of the
game's sounds for one of your own.
Move the paddle and keep the ball off the floor. With a mouse the
paddle follows it; with a finger, drag it. A click or a tap on the
board launches the ball. Menu pauses the game. Everything the ball
touches on the way up breaks, and when there is nothing breakable
left the level is finished and the next wall comes down.
Where the ball lands on the paddle decides where it goes. The
middle sends it straight back up; the further out towards an end, the
wider it is thrown. Nothing you do can make it go faster, so the
paddle is for aiming rather than for hitting.
You start with three balls, unless Balls in Settings (in Menu) says
otherwise. Lose the last one on the field and that is a ball gone;
lose them all and the run is over. The paddle goes back to normal
each time, so nothing you were carrying is held against you.
The chain
Bricks broken without the ball coming back to the paddle are worth
more and more as the chain grows. Getting a ball up over the top of
the wall and letting it rattle about up there is the best thing that
can happen in this game, and it is what the chain pays for.
The bricks
What falls out of a gift brick
Catch it with the paddle. One of the four is bad for you —
it is the only red one, the only spiked one, and its arrows point
inward. Let that one fall past.
The two versions
Classic is the game as everybody remembers it: most bricks go
in one hit and the interesting ones are interesting because of what
they do.
Countdown puts a number on every brick in the wall — how
many more hits it needs — and counts it down as you hit it. At
nought it goes. Nothing dies on the first touch, so you stop aiming
at bricks and start aiming at whichever part of the wall is nearly
through.
The walls
The first few are plain rectangles, then shapes, then pictures.
Clear the last one and the run is won. More walls are on the way.
Every Countdown run is numbered. Type the same number in, in
Settings, and every wall wears the same numbers, so a good run can
be played again — or handed to somebody else.
Your own rules
Balls, in Settings (in Menu), is how many a run starts with —
anything from 1 to 100. Wide paddle keeps the long paddle out
all the time, and the red capsule cannot shorten it.
A run played either way still counts towards the totals in
My record, but not towards the bests, so one run with a
hundred balls does not bury all the others.
Keys
- The mouse
- Move the paddle
- Left and right arrows
- Move the paddle
- Space, or Enter, or a click
- Launch the ball
- P
- Pause
- R
- Restart the level
- Escape
- Menu