Brick Out

A wall-clearing game stripped of story, characters, interludes between stages and any voice telling you how well you are doing. What remains is a bare rule set that has survived for decades purely because it was good enough on its own.

The common complaint concerns the closing minutes of a stage. Once only a few targets remain, scattered in the corners of the screen, the rhythm stretches out and becomes waiting rather than playing. Anyone who pushes through finds the next stage lively again straight away; it is the price this format charges.

Something else you notice within the first minute is the quiet. There is no music, only a short knock each time the ball meets something. That silence lets the rhythm of the knocks report the state of play instead of the picture, and plenty of people find they do better listening than staring.