Brick breaker · eight levels · about two to five minutes a run
Brick Buster
One paddle, one ball to start with, and a wall of bricks that would rather you stopped. Catch the falling tiles for an edge, and let the red one drop.
Brick Buster
Clear every brick to move on. Eight levels, then it starts again faster. Three lives, and the ball is only lost when the last one on the board drops.
- Move the mouse, or ← → / A D
- Space or click launch the ball
- P or Esc pause
- R restart
Catch the falling tiles: W wide, M multiball, S slow, L laser, + extra life. The red triangle narrows your paddle — let that one go.
Paused
The wall is not going anywhere. Neither is the ball.
Out of balls
0Best 0 · Level 1
Hold the ball on the paddle a beat and aim with the edge.
- Mouse moves the paddle
- ← → or A D move it too
- Space launches and relaunches
- Click the board to launch
- P pause
- R restart
Where you hit the ball is the whole game
Brick Buster does not have a physics engine and it does not want one. The ball leaves the paddle at an angle set entirely by how far from the middle it landed: clipped off the very edge and it goes out at nearly a right angle, caught dead centre and it goes straight up. That single rule is what turns a paddle into a tool. Once you can aim, you stop chasing the ball and start choosing which column to open next.
The ball will never settle into a flat, hopeless shuttle along the top of the screen. Anything that would come out too close to horizontal is pushed back up, and the speed is held between a floor and a ceiling, so a rally always ends in a decision rather than in a stalemate.
The bricks you cannot break, and the tile you should drop
Two things stop this being a game about holding the paddle under the ball. The first is the dark bricks: they look bolted to the wall because they are, and the only way past them is around. The Bunker level is a stack of them with two-brick-wide gaps, and finding each gap is a different problem from clearing the rows in front of it.
The second is the drop you have to refuse. Every powerup falls the same way and looks broadly the same, except one: a red triangle that narrows your paddle for ten seconds and is the only thing on the board that can cost you a life by catching it. Everything else is worth reaching for. That one is worth watching hit the floor.