I am sure that he worked hard on this, and put a lot of effort into this, but as far as breakout clones go, there are better ones. Breakout and Orzunoid come to mind. But hell, maybe it is _supposed_ to look like that.

-W-

I agree.. I mean.. I downloaded it when I first saw it, but I download most all good asm games.. I have around 100 on my calc haha.. The game itself is an ok game, but I fail to see the reason it was featured.. I've never played the Amiga game [heck.. I've never played an Amiga..] so I don't really know if it should look and play like this or not, but as far as gameplay is.. I'd prolly rate it about 6/10.. far from featuring status..

Why do you have so many games? There's no way there are 100 Asm games worth of staying on a calc. Interested in providing a list?

I totaly disagree. This is one of the best Breakout games out there. It is INCREDIBLE!!

Good job Richard!

It's not an amazing game and I don't like the titlescreen (:D).
I think its not coded badly, but are all breakout games featured? No. Why this one?
Keep up the work!
-Zeraz

Whats the best one for ti-89?

http://www.ticalc.org/archives /files/fileinfo/223/22381.html

Monster, by Patrick Davidson.

I was just going to write a good review for this game when I saw it featured. I don't get why all you other old goats are making this game look bad, because it is awesome! Great graphics and GUI. I especially like the title screen, it is so cool. The only problems are the speed, and I wish it had a teacher key like breakout. This game is equal to breakout, and superior to it in many aspects. It's the first great game of 2006. Maybe everyone else is just afraid to see Joe's Breakout possibly be surpassed...

Ahem..... Wizards.... Anyways, yes this is an awesome game!!! It's my favorite breakout game for 83+! It'd be awesome if there was a level editor.

Wizards is the last great game of 2005. Megaball is the first great game of 2006.

Indeed, this game is quite good. The graphics are great, although the shape of the paddle puzzled me for a while. I'm not familiar with the Amiga game which inspired this game, maybe that's why.

In any case, I agree that speed is an issue, especially when you have lasers and brickthrough together.

I've also found that there's one board (#9,I think) where the ball can get "stuck" bouncing from side to side against the indestructable blocks. Since it touches the paddle on each side, the indestructable blocks won't disappear, and there is nothing you can do except loose that paddle.

But, great job Richard!!

The Board#9 problem also happens with Breakout. The ball gets stuck and you just kill yourself. I wonder why that happens...

Maybe it's a "feature" of board #9, to make it more challenging.

If you let the ball continue to bounce around, the indestructable ones will eventually disappear.....

So did you wait like five hours or what?

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the copyright information at the bottom of many pages is wrong. This is a distinctive legal loop hole that should be addressed. Most pages say "Copyright 1996-2005"; however, some are even as old as to say "Copyright 1996-2004." (Take a look at the bottom of any page on ticalc.org, you'll see what I mean) As a fellow web programmer by trade, I know that this is often time consuming to update, but it is crucial.

-Rodney Blythe
VP Innovation

"This is a distinctive legal loop hole that should be addressed."
Copyrights are implied no matter what the years say. Even if you don't have a copyright message, just so long you don't explicitly waive it, the content is copyrighted.

Copyrights will expire after (as Michael said below) a very large number of years, so we wouldn't have to update that for 10 years or so and we still hold the copyright to it. It's no big deal.

Also, it's not that time consuming to change; many pages are automatically generated based on templates. So it's not like we have to do it on every page by hand (and even then, it'd be trivial to write a shell script to do it automatically.)

Copyright lasts for such a ridiculous number of years that it wouldn't be an issue.

IIRC, it's 50 years after the author dies, or 50 years after the owning entity dies, whichever is longer.

I also find it kind of funny to see this on your own (Web Page)'s default page:
"Copyright 2000-2005, Vortex Productions. All rights reserved. "

And... oh God! Domain _forwarding_. *shudders*

-W-

I don't mean anything bad by this, but what does this have to do with Megaball? It was just a random response...

It's relevant to ticalc.org, and in the place where it will most easily be seen. Of course, it would probably be better to email this sort of thing, but if he's going to post it on the site, I'd say he posted it in the best place he could have.

I think a fun round of stfu ot noob is in order. :D j/k
This seems to be a nicely-done game, if not extraordinary.

Richard, first off man I think you did a bang up job. Graphics wise, I think this is fairly top notch, the menu is damn good and the bonuses and other animations arent bad either.

The only major problem I had was ball physics, normally (ie reality) when the ball hits the left side of the paddel coming down from the left side it should bounce back to the left and up, everytime in MegaBall, the ball would bounce right and up when it was coming from the left and hit the left side of the paddel. Which wasn't good, especially when I had one block left to get and I would position my paddel to bounce the ball back in theory right towards the block, but to my surprise it would go the complete opposite.

Also that #9 board did get me urked... :P

I would also like to see the ball as more of well, a ball:
001100
010110
011110
001100
I have no idea on the sprite sizes, but that is just something I would like to see... :)

All in all this is a great breakout game, with a few fixes and maybe a board editor, this would surely be one of the best breakout games for the 83s. If you havent downloaded this game, it certainly deserves a look. Great job Richard!

-Travis Supalla (Madskillz)
www.revsoft.org

Thanks for playing my game and for the comments!

As for the physics, I know they are not "correct", but a lot of breakout-style and Pong games have this kind of bounce-physics. Maybe it takes some time to get used to it though...

The sprite of the ball is just a 2x2 square of pixels. It is this small, because of the size of the blocks and the paddle. (Also, collisions are easier, because collisions are checked only for the upper-left pixel) Furthermore, a tail of balls is drawn on the screen, to make it more visible. Any detail in the ball-sprite will get lost anyways.

- Richard