Crackout review - Nintendo Entertainment System

It's a bat's life, isn't it? Not only are you a mere length of bouncy material, suitable for bouncing balls off, but now you're trapped behind many walls of multi-coloured bricks, patrolled by a variety of fearsome alien guardians. Luckily, your spheroid-bouncing capabilities have provided you with a unique method of escape. By simply spanging a ball off various parts of what can be deemed your body, you can destroy the bricks which keep you prisoner, and the aliens as well!

Thus armed you set out on your Breakout-style bid for freedom, set over a number of static screens. Use your knowledge of ballistics and spatial geometry to destroy the bricks to best effect. If things get too hard, hit an enemy and grab a power-up. But watch out, you have only a limited number of balls with which to escape. Should you lose them all, you are trapped forever.

What the Mean Machines staff thought

Crackout's only rival in the travesty stakes is the piteous shambles they call Road Fighter. Right from the start, Crackout is boredom incarnate. There are no options and the title screen is as plain as it could get without just being copyright details. Start the game, and you are "treated" to a horrific cacophony that bodes badly for the rest of the game. Sadly, the game itself is even worse. The graphics are blandness extreme, unimaginative, poorly drawn and drably coloured. The deflection logic of the ball is decidedly ropey, it's impossible to hit the ball in a straight line for a start, and moving one pixel to one side usually results in a massive change of direction for the ball. The screens themselves are diabolical. The programmer's idea of a challenge is to either place a row of extra-hard bricks about one centimetre from your bat or to make the screen completely impossible unless you collect the right power-up. As the power-ups are distributed randomly, it's not unusual to spend up to ten minutes just killing aliens before finally leaving the screen. One specific screen which typifies Crackout is an example from the first level. The ball must be bounced through an alley of two walls to reach a few bricks otherwise protected. This can only be done by hitting the ball at exactly the right angle at exactly the right time. Should you achieve this, the ball will almost certainly hit the bricks immediately and the screen will be completed. It must have taken all of thirty seconds to think that one up, and for Crackout that's quite a complex screen! Crackout redefines the words repetitive, frustrating and dull, and while it's not quite as bad as Road Fighter, it's still unforgivable that this ever saw the light of day.

What do you get when you program a Breakout-style game with diabolically boring and unimaginative screen layouts, crappy bat control, hopeless collision detection, a tune that's about as pleasant as a baboon farting in your ear, graphics which are about as thrilling as a baboon farting in your face, totally unrealistic ball movement, action that's so dull that you want to turn the game off after fifteen minutes of playing and some totally irritating gameplay quirks like the fact that power-ups are random and often they're vital to complete a screen so you hang about for ages waiting for them to appear? Crackout.