I've never sat down and played Breakout or its many clones all the way through. It's always been a passing fancy for me like OH I know what this is. I had the feeling recently when I encountered an aspect of Animal Well that incorporates Breakout elements and even has a hidden area where you play a lil version of it. It's neat!

Recently I had a hankering to play Donkey Kong (1994) on Game Boy and checked Nintendo Online Game Boy games for it and while I didn't find Donkey Kong I DID find Alleyway. Alleyway is unapologetically a Breakout clone. It has Mario jump into a lil spaceship lookin vehicle that serves as the paddle or whatever and you proceed to play Breakout.

What IS Breakout anyway? It's basically vertical ping pong but instead of an opponent you're sending the ball back against different color rectangular bricks aligned in a grid. As the ball hits the bricks, they disappear. Make all the bricks disappear and you beat the stage!

In Alleyway specifically, stages evolve to have different configurations. They'll be spaces out or scrolling vertically across the screen. Sometimes they'll scroll down towards you on the screen and often times they'll be built around unbreakable blocks that add to the complexity of getting the ball where you want it to go. Maybe original Breakout does this too but again I never really tried to play that game.

The game itself is simple then in how it plays. As I say, its a matter of deflecting the ball with a moving paddle (or whatever Mario is piloting) and removing the bricks on screen. Different configurations of bricks as the stages go on end up putting you at their mercy as you end up just kinda watching the ball and hoping the way to deflected it will get some of the bricks out. There's some element of strategy to how you move the paddle and the trajectory the ball takes from there but once its out into a stage of moving parts it just feels like luck if anything happens or it gets swiftly smacked back to you.

It's pretty enjoyable overall though. It's not as mentally stimulating as something like Tetris but it does have the old arcade feel of just jumping to it real quick and getting through it. I'd say also compared to Tetris it also has it's version of satisfyingly deleting four rows in a row but in Alleyway its much more sporadic and random unlike the careful planning of a Tetris.

Otherwise it's the standard arcade game trappings. Every brick you break adds to your score. Go for a high score! X amount of points gets you an extra life and you can have nine spare lives. Lose a life if the ball makes it past your paddle. There's 24 stages and you get a WIN screen if you beat them all but you have to do them all in one sitting (or make suspend points if playing Nintendo Online) and then after that screen it just loops levels and calls it Stage 25 and you can keep going for a high score repeating those same 24 levels.

OH right also it's a Nintendo game so every six(?) or four(?) stages you get a bonus stage where the bricks are arraged like big pixels to make a shape from Mario games which can range from Mario himself or Bowser or even piranha plant I think? These stages are neat and just offer the pure bliss of clearing the bricks quickly as they don't ricochet when hit and just clear everything in the path of the ball as it flies toward the edge of the screen. There's some challenge to these too as they're the only timed levels and you wanna clear ALL the bricks in that time to get a big point bonus! It's a nice shakeup after a few levels of the usual game.

So yeah. It's a portable Breakout clone. It's neat I think. Not much to it but I just realized I had the opportunity to sit down and really play though one and see how it goes. They switch up the stages a bit to keep you going but it's not great for binge play as it can get kinda old. ALSO there's no continue or save functionality in the proper Game Boy version and some of the way it feels random can make levels take A WHILE.

I recommend this game if you ever got curious about Breakout but only if you happen to have Nintendo Online and/or access to save states so you can play it in chunks at your leisure. Maybe you have the actual Game Boy game and lots of free time to play to completion in one sitting? I know as a kid I wouldn't have been able to be on my Game Boy long enough to get through all 24 levels. Nintendo crazy for this one. I mostly just like the idea of the paddle being a vehicle Mario is in lol. Sorry if you read all this ok bye.