Here’s a fun experiment you can do at home! Go to Google and search for Arkanoid. You should see some five-dozen free online flash games, each one implementing one or two new wrinkles into the classic brickout-with-powerups archetype. Now, open each one of those games in a new tab, and attempt to play every one of them at once. In short order, you should be tripping over multiple interfaces, losing track of the ball, and you should feel a stinging sensation as your brain attempts to process the overabundance of color and effects. Now, on top of this process, pop in a DVD of Scarface and let the “Push it to the Limit” montage scene run in the background on an endless loop, letting the entire game take on a vague theme of a coke-fueled rise to success. This is very much what it feels like to play Block Breaker Deluxe! You have now saved 800 Wii Points and 285 valuable memory blocks.
Block Breaker Deluxe is by no means a terrible game — it just comes across as the wrong game for the wrong system. This is possibly because the game was not originally designed for WiiWare. Gameloft, the title’s publisher and developer, originally released Block Breaker Deluxe for mobile phones a few years ago, and as a mobile title, I could see myself having a good time with it. On the Wii, however, it’s just a bad fit. Brickout, regardless of how many bells and whistles you attach to it (and believe me, Block Breaker Deluxe attaches plenty), is the kind of super-casual game you play to kill time on the bus, or in line at the airport, or for free online when the boss isn’t looking. It’s a game one plays on impulse; once you’ve forced a player to boot up the Wii, load the program, sit through an unskippable logo-movie, navigate through the menus and read up on the story, they may not even remember why they felt like playing.
For those of you wondering if I actually said “story” in that last sentence, the answer is “yes.” Block Breaker Deluxe has more than a vague plotline, it has taken brickout and created an entire world around it. The title centers around a 1980s-era sin city where flashy outfits and bright lights mask a seedy underworld of high-stakes Block Breaker games. Playing through Block Breaker Deluxe will send you on a whirlwind journey where people play the game professionally, where brick-busting skills can see you winning and losing millions at the flick of a Wiimote, and where the top players compete in “dangerous” underground arenas for prizes like trading cards, jetskis, and dogs, and most incredibly of all, none of the above is presented with even a hint of irony. If a player is so inclined, he can immerse himself fully in illicit Block Breaker culture, imagining that he is winning hundreds of thousands of dollars every 30 seconds, and where he is somehow receiving items like fur coats and rare paintings from arcade machines. Honestly, every inch of the “story” elements are presented so genuinely, yet so over-the-top hilarious, that they nearly justify the 800 Wii Point price tag. I could spend an entire page on the needless “plot” devices in Block Breaker Deluxe, but I’ll just summarize by saying that I honestly never expected to be trading a silk scarf to a triple-divorcee in exchange for part of the secret password to compete in an exclusive Block Breaker tournament against a cocky mobster who calls himself “Don Pong.”
Assuming your interest in Block Breaker Deluxe doesn’t involve the juicy stories of drug-addled excess, how does the game actually play? The answer, unsurprisingly, is “like brickout.” You control a paddle at the bottom of the screen, bouncing a ball off of colorful bricks in the playing field in an effort to make them disappear. The controls are about what you’d expect from a Wii adaptation; pointing the Wiimote at the screen translates directly to the lateral position of your paddle. There is an alternate control scheme available where the paddle can be moved with the directional pad, but it’s not very good — instead of predictable, constant movement, pressing the D-pad moves your paddle in an accelerating fashion, slowly at first, and then much faster after a moment. This control scheme is fairly worthless when trying to get into a precise position at a moment’s notice, but the Wiimote-pointing works well enough — except on a few occasions when you will swear the ball has gone right through your paddle. The collision detection is a little fiddly at times, which is rather upsetting for a game involving nothing but collisions.
The visuals and sound do a nice job, for the most part. Early-80s disco tunes run in undistracting loops while you play, accompanied by appropriately bouncy sound effects. Occasionally, a voice sample will praise you for a nice combo. Graphically, Block Breaker Deluxe is about on par with its retro theme — it’s strictly a 2D affair, using canned animations and decently-drawn sprites. It’s brickout, after all, and subtle visuals are called for; there’s really only so far you can go with bricks & balls without losing track of the game underneath a lot of flashy effects and overbearing interface choices.
This brings me to my biggest complaint about Brick Breaker Deluxe: it frequently makes you lose track of the game underneath a lot of flashy effects and overbearing interface choices. The game seems utterly determined not to get pegged as “just another brickout clone,” and as such, has taken on dozens of new features, powerups, and mini-game-like extras in order to stand out. Unfortunately, the end result is that it ultimately collapses under its own weight. This isn’t about the bizarre addition of the story elements — those parts are actually funny. The game design, however, tends to fluctuate between confusing and pointless.
Any Arkanoid fan will be familiar with most of the power-up staples included here: Paddle-mounted lasers, multiballs, magnetic “catch” paddles, superballs that can smash through otherwise unbreakable bricks, and so forth. The obstacles are familiar as well: bricks that require multiple hits to break, bricks which spawn new bricks, bomb and/or trigger bricks which remove several bricks at once. Used alongside clever level design, such variety can make for engaging gameplay that stays fresh. Unfortunately, the level design tends to either overload you with power-ups, or doesn’t give you enough — there’s no happy medium to speak of. In cases of the former, the game will give you so many multiball powerups that the stage becomes flooded with extra balls, clearing under fifteen seconds with zero effort. In cases of the latter, every power-up — as well as every breakable brick — will be blocked behind unbreakable bricks, making the entire process contingent on pulling off an overly difficult needle-threading shot. This becomes frustrating, as the ball’s speed increases with every bounce, making it harder and harder to pull off the same shot you haven’t already gotten at the slower speed. As such, nearly every stage ends with the bonus timer almost entirely full — or long empty.
Then, there are the mini-games. Roughly 60% of the way through the game’s main levels, you will take your Block Breaker game into a high-rolling casino, where you will be called upon to shoot dice, play slots, or draw a hand of poker — all while still playing the main brickout game. Special bricks on the board will trigger a new card or a spin of the slots, and good luck can see you raking in thousands of extra dollars. Unfortunately, while certainly an inventive extra to include in the game, the casino mini-games appear within the normal field of play, sometimes obscuring the entire top two rows of bricks. Imagine, if you will, that you’ve cleared all bricks except perhaps one or two at the top of the field. One of those bricks happens to be a special “card” brick which will conclude the “poker” mini-game which is presently engaged. Unfortunately, since the poker HUD has appeared over that portion of the field, you have no way to aim for that brick, and you must instead just keep bouncing your ball into the invisible area and hope for the best.
The game also boasts a multiplayer feature, which I feel obligated to caution you against. Block Breaker Deluxe may have its moments, but the multiplayer is not one of them. The word that came to mind while sampling it, honestly, was “worthless.” Each player controls a paddle on opposite ends of the playing field, but rather than the expected “air hockey” objective of slipping a ball past your opponent, the objective is instead to score more points by breaking more bricks than the other player. Given that several levels have enough bricks to make it difficult to even get the ball across the field to the other player, this typically boils down to “The player who starts with the ball wins.” Even missing the ball and “losing a life” seems to be inconsequential — the player to start with the ball after a miss seems completely arbitrary, often times awarding control to a player who technically just made a mistake.
Ultimately, if wildly unpredictable brickout is your thing, then Block Breaker Deluxe has you covered. Playing through the 50 main levels will take you 2-3 hours, and from there, you can unlock a random level generator, which will provide more of the aforementioned 12-second or 5-minute experiences with no middle ground. But, unless you really, really like brickout, I wouldn’t bother with Block Breaker Deluxe. It’s trying too hard to be a full-featured game to work well as a casual title, but the gameplay is so decidedly casual that it doesn’t have the necessary longevity of a full feature, and that’s a catch-22 that isn’t worth your points or memory blocks.
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