Brickout

Brickout
Game No.	3
Voting	7.19 points, 16 votes
Developer	Christian Kleinhuis (Coder), Sven Ruthner (Gfx & Animation)
Company	Prollcoder
Musician	Sebastian Kuehn (aka Rio/Rattenrudel)
Release	2007
Platform	C64
Genre	Brain, Arcade
Gamemode	Single player
Operation
Media
Language
Information	Breackpoint 2007 (32k-Game - #4)

Description

The goal of the game Brickout is to clear the game area of all bricks. Stones are removed by placing the cursor (the hammer which follows the movement of the joystick) on a row of stones and pressing fire. The row can be vertical or horizontal (not diagonal) and must at least have two stones of the same colour. The more bricks of the same colour are removed at once the higher the score will be for that move. When all stones in the level are removed, the level is solved.

Furthermore there is the possibility to topple the game area around the horizontal axis ("flip" - i.e. all stones lying on the top will lie underneath the others after this action and vice versa), or to push the leftmost row out of the screen and in again on the right side "shift" to improve the positions of the stones.

The points are also interesting. The more stones you remove from the game area in the last move, the higher your bonus points get (see section points). Masters of this game will try to remove 20 or more stones in the last move.

In the higher levels stones start to slide, i.e. if a row has been fully cleared and by this two rows of stones can close the gap, the upper stones will slide to the side (if there is space) and fall to the row lying next to them.

If you play in the difficulty level "Hard", a fifth brick colour appears on the game area, which makes it even harder to clear the level.

There are 99 levels in the game which can be chosen randomly to start from. There's also a hidden level 100 as well as the possibility to play all 99 levels in a shuffled order within each difficulty stage. Each level has an own highscore list with each the 10 best and 10 worst entries, which are also saved on disk.

Design

... an excerpt from the game ...

... The animation shows the different possibilties in using SHIFT and FLIP, a bronze level is played. ...

The game has been programmed entirely in assembly language. The sound effects match the movements of the bricks very well. The game can be controlled by mouse or joystick. Those input devices are also used for entering the players' data. High- and lowscores are saved onto a separate disk. The name of the last player from a previous session is automatically restored.

There are 3 difficulty levels:

• Easy - 4 different types of bricks, the likelihood of one particular brick-type is increased
• Normal - 4 different types of bricks, the likelihood of all brick-types is equally distributed
• Hard - One more type of brick adds to the crowd

The game comprises 4 different SID tunes, created by RIO:

• Intro
• Choosing Level
• Game Over and game area NOT entirely cleared
• Game Over and game area entirely cleared

If you make it to clear all bricks in one level you receive a Bronze, Silver or Gold Cup according to the difficulty level.

Hints

The main menu

This menu appears after loading the game. As in all other menues the hammer serves as cursor that can be moved with the joystick, for confirming a press of the fire button on the chosen option is enough. In this menu the following sub menues and function can be chosen:

• Entering the name
• Start playing with the set level
• Choosing the level
• View highscore of the current level
• See short manual
• Greetings, etc.

Points

• During the game the number of removed stones in the current move is simply squared and added to the score as points. Example: 2 = 4 points, 3 = 9 points, 4 = 16 points, 5 = 25 points, . . . , 10 = 100 points

• After the game, the number of the stones removed at the last move is taken cubed (number of stones x number of stones x number of stones) and added to the score. Example: 2 = 8 points, 3 = 27 points, 4 = 64 points, 5 = 125 points, . . . , 10 = 1000 points.

• Also the score is doubled when the whole level is cleared.

Solution

• Tip to make more points: Als letzten Zug so viele Steinchen wie möglich abräumen, die letzte Anzahl weggenommener Steinchen geht bei der 95% Version als kubische Punktzahl ein, nimmt man z.B. 30 Steine am Ende weg, erhält man 27.000 Punkte. Try to clear as many bricks as possible with the last move; the last number of stones taken away goes in the 95% version adds by the power of 3! E. g.: If one takes away 30 bricks at the end of the game it gains 27.000 points!
• Besides the standard levels 0 through 99 there's an additional level 100. There's nothing special to it but being yet another HARD-level.

Cheats

Not known.

Voting

Voting of the C64-Wiki users (10=the best vote):
7.19 points at 16 votes (rank 390). You need to be logged in to cast a vote.
C64Games	6	05th May 2007 - "good" 18 downs
CSDb	9,1	14th April 2007 - 179 downloads bei 10 Votes

Reviews

Sledgie: "The game is highly addictive and makes a lot of fun. Graphics and sound effects match the gameplay very well."

Robotron2084: "Exemplary puzzle hit with great catchy song, which you can and really need to stick to for a loooong time. Hats off for this great work, boys! 9 out of 10 points."

Blubarju: "A really good and motivating logical game with many features. Which other game has next to a high-score table also a low-score table. 8 points!"

Miscellaneous

Cover

For this game no official cover was released.

Highscore

1. Werner - 39.479 - L101 (04.05.2007)
2. Robotron2084 - 36.150 - L101 (03.05.2007)
3. Cthulhu - 24.567 - L001 (13.05.2007)
4. Trifox - 12.395 - L000 (19.04.2007)
5. Sledgie - 2.332 - L000 (30.04.2007)
6. Fenris64 - 1.038 - L000 (25.04.2007)

	#2 Robotron2084		#3 Cthulhu

• 

  #4 Trifox

• 

  #5 Sledgie

• 

  #6 Fenris64

• 

  Cthulhu – 19945 L000

• 

  Werner – 15853 L000

• 

  Cthulhu – 7073 L001

• 

  Werner – 5028 L001

Table for high and lowscore of all levels

Level	Rang 1 (Highscore)	Rang 2 (Highscore)	Rang 3 (Highscore)		Rang 1 (Lowscore)	Rang 2 (Lowscore)	Rang 3 (Lowscore)
000	Cthulhu - 19945- Image	Werner - 15853 - Image	Trifox - 12395 - Image		Werner - 212 - Image	Cthulhu - 391 - Image	Sledgie - 468 - Image
001	Cthulhu - 24567 - Image	Werner - 5028 - Image	.		Werner - 418 - Image	Cthulhu - 443 - Image	.
002	.		.		.	.	.
101	Werner - 39479 - Image	Robotron 2084 - 36150 - Image	.		.	.	.

Competition

From the 25.04.2007 a competition is running in the Forum-64: direct to the thread

Links

• C64Games.de - Game No. 4759 (patch 4 - current version)
• Gamebase64.com - Game No. 20348
• CSDb - Release No. 103896 (one-filed)
• CSDb - Release No. 48051

---

Prollcoder The game is sold exclusively by Prollcoder.com - current versions can be found there first.