Brickbreaker is an Breakout clone for the Blackberry. It ships for free on all phones, I think. It came with my Blackberry Pearl. I can’t imagine there’s any reason for it to be there, other than the fact that it proves to you that your game can run games (and, therefore, you should buy games).

It could’ve used a few more QA runs. Its physics are dodgy. I assume you know a thing or two about Breakout clones, if you’re reading this; if not, try this for about 30 seconds and i’m sure you’ll know what I mean. You get a paddle, and a ball, and a bunch of bricks that the ball breaks, and you have to break them all. It’s Pong Vs. A Wall. It’s ubiquitous.

There are good Breakout clones out there, to be sure: the DS title “Nervous Brickdown” played around with the formula a lot, to pretty good results. Arkanoid is an arcade classic. I’ve not played Arkanoid for the DS, let alone with the custom paddle controller, but I bet it’s fantastic. Brickbreaker on the Blackberry is mediocre when compared to the vast multitude of clones out there. Its entire existence is designed to waste a bit of time here and there and make you consider buying more games on your phone.

And yet, I play it — hardcore.

I can think of few other games with a more broken physics set. Balls will bounce at weird angles and go through walls and the paddle will completely miss balls it shouldn’t miss at times. The controls aren’t exactly good, either: the trackball on a Blackberry Pearl isn’t exactly the most high-quality device (more on that later). Maybe, though, it’s that it’s on my phone, and I don’t look like a total dork staring at it on the metro, but I end up playing it a lot. Far more than my DS, anyway. I have a couple other games for my Pearl, though. A friend of mine worked for a place where he could get me a few for free, but nothing touches Brickbreaker as far as play goes. It’s so lightweight that it boots immediately and requires virtually no battery, and you can pause it at any time.

What I love about Brickbreaker is… I can’t believe I’m saying this… the depth. I am absolutely convinced that a lot of the depth is accidental (to be fair, I am convinced a vast majority of quality in games is accidental, over the history of video games), but it’s there nonetheless. The powerups are as bland as cornmeal, but open the game to interesting permutations. Multi makes many balls, but they shoot in four upward directions from the main ball the second you get it. This means waiting a split second might mean the difference between uselessness and quick finishing. Gun allows you to blow up any brick in one shot, even the “unbreakable ones.” This means you can break some levels by popping holes into boxes with only one rather inaccessible hole in them. One powerup flips your controls, offering no bonus other than the usual 50 points coming with a powerup– making it poison to a new player, and free points to a veteran.

The longer you play, the faster the ball moves until you lose a life. If you aren’t directing every shot with precision (as much as the nonsensical physics will afford, at least), the puzzle starts dropping towards you, applying even more pressure. There are levels I am convinced are unbeatable if you let it drop all of the way, so it often makes sense to drop a life that these points like some sort of ablative armor. Throw a steak to the hungry wolves outside to spare your life-meat.

Once you beat the 34th level, you loop back to the first stage. It took me months to realize this, because some of the levels leading up are so brutally difficult to the learning player. Once you loop back to 1, though, you think “boy, I can just play infinitely!” However, the puzzles start dropping from shot ONE in this playthrough.

My high score when I started writing this was 28000 points. Since, it became 32780. I made it to level 31 of the second playthough. Sadly, I’ll probably never beat this score, because Pearl’s trackball has a pretty poor lifetime. Mine sticks intermittently, now, and I lose dozens of lives because it decides to crap out mid-move.

Recently, I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress. If you’re not familiar, it’s a wildly inaccessible and “hardcore” game, in alpha stage for the PC. You take control of seven dwarves, who are dropped somewhere on a very detailed, randomly-generated planet, and must fend for themselves with the meager supplies with which they start. Oh, and the graphics are ASCII– so, really, they look more like floating hpapy faces than they do like dwarves.

The thing is, this game is intense. The game’s unofficial catchphrase is “losing is fun!” There’s no mouse input, so it relies entirely on a cryptic keyboard input system. It’s geared to kick your ass over and over, and appeals to the most hardcore of roguelike-loving, masochistic super-simulation geeks.

And yet, I play it. Casually.

It may not make sense, but allow me to paint a picture for you of my typical playthough. It starts with generating a world, a massive processor-buster that takes ten minutes and procedurally generates a geography, a thousand years of culture, and the constantly shifting borders of good and evil. Once done, you can begin a new game, and set up your seven dwarves with skills, items, and a location. Picking a location is important. You want water, at the very least; however, you also want a mountain to dig into from the start (you don’t have to, but it makes things a bit easier on you). You want nice types of stone, to sell or make into things, and you want to avoid aquifers, which make your structures leak. Unless you play hardcore, anyway. Which I do not.

Once you’ve picked a location and setup, your little dudes hit the great wild and need to make a home. Here’s where I get casual about it: I turn it into a game of The Sims. I make little bedrooms for my dudes, make sure they have food, make them do jobs (like making doors out of stone and chairs out of wood), make their living space good… and, by the time the first year is over, and they have a nice little place, I start losing interest. I don’t particularly care about fighting badguys or trade routes or traps or weapons. To paraphrase something I’m sure I’ve already paraphrased this year, in this blog, I just want four walls and limestone slabs for my dwarves.

But, really, this is yet another reason the “hardcore/casual” indicators are sloppy, particularly for games. There are many “hardcore” games that are, for lack of a better term, played in a “casual” manner. I picked up Halo 3, a holy grail of hardcoredom, and played a match here or there online and appreciated it. I thought it was fun to be able to jump really high. I hardly touched it after the first few weeks. I might pick it up again if some friends decide to have a round, but I require little more. I play a bit of Rock Band when drunk, but only on medium, and I don’t really care about challenge so much as I do pushing buttons and making lights blink. Starcraft? I dig the colors, but you lose me once you talk about build trees or click speeds. I like to pick up Street Fighter every once in a while, but I still don’t know what a link or chain or focus or cancel are. I just like tossing hadokens. My Dwarf Fortress games are just that: the equivalent of doing a few hadokens, enjoying myself, and turning it off.

It’s not to say I’m simply a casual gamer, however. There are casual games I play in a hardcore manner. I’ll tell you a bit more about that in my next post called “Casual, played Hardcore: My Experience With Brickbreaker.” Yeah, Brickbreaker. As in, the free mobile game that ships on Blackberries.