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Bounce
Arcade · Oldies · plays in your browser, no download
A bat at the bottom, a ball, and a wall you take apart one brick at a time. There is exactly one control and exactly one idea: where on the bat you catch the ball decides where it goes. Everything else you will ever learn about this game is a consequence of that.
Where it comes from
The brick wall reached the arcades in 1976, out of a simple idea: take the two-bat tennis game that was everywhere at the time, stand it on end, and make it work for one player. In place of an opponent there is a wall, and the wall does not answer back — it wears away.
Ten years later the same idea came back with the thing it had been missing — bricks that drop something when you break them — and nobody has made one without since. The reason is that it changes where you look: not only at the ball any more, but at what is falling, and whether you want it.
How to play
| Move the bat | Left and right arrows, or A and D. On a phone, slide your thumb along the bottom. |
|---|---|
| Launch | Space, or tap. |
| The angle | Catch the ball on the edge of the bat and it leaves steeply. Catch it in the middle and it comes back almost straight up. |
That last line is the whole game. A player who hits the ball wherever it happens to arrive is being steered by the ball; a player who moves so that it arrives on the part of the bat they want is steering it.
Our version
A straight one — bat, ball, bricks, no clutter — and it runs in a browser tab on a phone or a laptop with nothing to install.
Three things that help
Open a channel up the side. Clear a column at one end, get the ball above the wall, and it will eat the bricks from the top for free while you wait. This is the single highest-scoring idea in the game and it has been since 1976.
Do not chase the ball. Go to where it is going and arrive early. You get to choose the contact point only if you are already there.
The ball speeds up. It always does, usually after a set number of hits and when you break into the top rows. Expect it rather than being surprised by it.