Block Breaker

Block Breaker strips the classic brick game back to a square dark-grey box. Four rows of rounded bricks, blue, red, yellow and green, hang near the top; a white paddle and a white ball sit at the bottom; a five-digit score runs across the header next to three dots that stand for your lives. Before the first serve a small panel shows the arrow keys, and pressing one sends the ball upward.

From there it is the old loop. The ball bounces off walls and bricks, you slide the paddle underneath to send it back, and every brick that breaks adds to the score; the first one in our test was worth fifty. Where the ball meets the paddle matters: a hit near the middle returns it steeply, a hit near an edge sends it off at a sharp angle, and steering with the edges is how you reach a corner that a straight bounce will never touch.

Some bricks are marked. A brick labelled TNT blows up the bricks around it. Others carry a small plus or a circle, and breaking them releases a pickup that drifts down and has to be caught with the paddle: a wider paddle, extra balls, a pair of blasters that shoot upward on their own, or an extra life. Not every brick dies in one hit, and the dotted outline left behind by some shows a brick that still needs another strike.

There is no final level. New rows keep arriving as you clear the old ones, so a run ends only when the last ball drops past the paddle, and the score is the record of how long you held out. With a single serve and an instant restart, a run can last twenty seconds or twenty minutes, and the fullscreen button in the corner helps on a large monitor where the square field otherwise looks small.