Breakout clones

I was in zombie mode looking for different styles of game apps that I hadn't already gotten tired of, and saw some clones of the old Breakout game, the Atari arcade favorite of mine from when I was a kid.  It's a simple concept;, bounce balls and break blocks, while everything speeds up to the point where you lose your marbles. 

What I was not prepared for is how incredibly similar the games were.  Supposedly from different companies, I tried about 8 of them and almost could not tell them apart.  There were the same screens, the same exact ball dynamics, the same attempts to get micropayments, even the same starting ball counts.

Anyway, there are two main categories: one where you have the paddle at the bottom of the screen, and one where you just spit out 50 or 60 balls and watch them do their thing.  

I don't really like the paddles on phones, it's no fun trying to drag it around with a finger.  I find that I lose the ball 90% of the time due to the screen getting too dry or my finger slipping.  Meh.

Of the paddle types that I tried, the one that looked best to me was Ancient Bricks, by Zippy Mobile.  Enough graphical depth without flashy overkill, and the theme is looking through dark hallways for things, so that works for me.

Of the multiball types, I uninstalled a few right away for either starting with ads or having a non-stop babble of a voice saying "Excellent", "Wow", "Great" every few seconds.  What the hell, really ... do they actually think I need a constant stream of empty praises?  I just want to bust my way through the puzzles.  

Here are three of the ones I got screenshots of: Bricks & Balls, Bricks Breaker Quest and Brick Out.  The actual levels look like this:

Even looking at them here, I can't name which is which.  They all have a standard set of brick types and power ups, some levels with locking blocks, blocks that alternate between states, some row or column destroyers, bonus balls, direction randomizers, rotators, some with huge numbers on each block so you have to bounce around corners and get to a big TNT in the center ... so similar.  

Now, on to the super-standardized screens that exist only for monetization or trying to get players to spend more time playing.  Of course they all have some weird monthly membership pitch, and ads that popup between levels, and clubs or teams, all of it falling flat to my ears.  Why?  Even the daily bonuses are almost exact clones:

I don't know what those symbols even mean half the time.  I never use the power ups on these things, either I can beat it or I can't.  Maybe one game out of 20 I will click some icon to remove a row, and that's it.  All have occasional "bonus trips" which are 5 or 6 or 8 new levels with a theme or slogan that lead to some reward at the end. 

I actually get a kick out of watching those 50-or-so balls streaming through the patterns of blocks.  Always attack from the top and look for blocks that can remove other blocks.  Sometimes when you get a mass of balls going nuts, they almost look like living things ... every now and then one ball will leave the group and try another hallway, or a whole bunch will break through one weak block and flood the next space.  I know it's mostly just a matter of little bumps here and there to stop infinite loops, and corners have slightly different fudge code from one game to the next.  But they do look like bugs eating their way through the world sometimes.

It's not totally mindless.  It's possible to use skill to line up a stream of balls to hit one block directly, hit a second block on the rebound, then pass through to a third target when the first block is gone.  First glance at some levels says there's no way you can take out 15000 points of obstacles with just 50 balls before you get squished, but yeah, with 2-4 rebounds per second in the cramped areas, they can eat away a puzzle in no time, if you find the weak spots and can get to them.

I don't know that the type of game really has any depth to it, or much room to grow, but I'd like to think that more variety is possible.

For fun, here is some history on the original Atari game ... enjoy.