Hyperballoid HD

Picture the scene. You’ve got a supercollider containing one atom of the classic game Arkanoid, and one atom of the newest “classic” game on the block, Peggle. Using science beyond your comprehension probably involving magnets, and despite the warnings from a scientist somewhere that you could unravel the very fabric of time and space itself, you fire these two atoms towards each other at great speed. There’ll probably be a bang. But instead of the life-ending black hole of terror, you’ll find yourself looking at Hyperballoid HD, available now from the Playstation Store.

Hyperballoid HD is Arkanoid. There’s no two ways about it. You have a bat. You have a ball. You have bricks to hit with the ball. You can fill in the rest of the gaps. Where it begins to be a little bit different is that it’s borrowed a few tricks from Peggle’s level designs. Remember the levels of Peggle where the blocks made a flower, that was nifty wasn’t it? It was better, though on the levels where things moved – like the crazily spinning helix on one of the last levels. That’s the level design you’ll find in Hyperballoid.

At one point you’ll find a horse comes sliding onto the screen, representing the seige of Troy. Before you know what’s what the horse opens and more blocks come out. I found that rather nifty and a change from the blockier static levels you’d find in Arkanoid. The graphics are, as you’d expect from something with “HD” in the title, very pretty – the backdrops being the main pull of the game, depicting futuristic spacescapes or ancient hieroglyphs – but when you’ve got a balls and blocks game, the graphics don’t really matter as much as the gameplay.

Hyperballoid works as well as you’d expect. Move the paddle left and right, bounce the ball, hit the blocks, collect power-ups and gems, jobs-a-good ‘un. There are, for my mind, too many potential power ups in the game. If I had a stick, there would be more power-ups than I was capable of shaking my stick at. What makes it stranger, then, is that despite the vast number available I always seem to get the same few – the gun, the extended bat, the slow ball, the multiball and the sticky bat. There are at least a gazillion others, some of which are coloured red and therefore bad for you. I haven’t seen them at all!

My one quibble with the title is when you’re down to your last few bricks. I haven’t got this completely sussed out yet, and haven’t found an actual explanation of the gameplay either, but it seems that when you’ve destroyed most of the blocks on the level you will, eventually, be able to collect a warp power up which falls from the top of the screen and buys you a ride to the next level. If you miss this, another will be along in a while. You can proceed the old-school way, by destroying all the bricks but there were many a level where I was down to my last couple of blocks and I would have had more chance of hitting Silvio Berlusconi with a statue than I would of hitting those blocks with my ball. I found though, that the wait for the warp pick-up was a long and tedious one, which often threatened to sap my spirit and stop me playing, which is why I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here and saying it may be that I hadn’t quite understood the factors in releasing the warp doohicky. With 100 levels to go at, this warp issue may be enough to deter players from getting all the way through the game.