Megaball
Ed Mackey released the original version of Megaball for Amiga in 1991. Megaball is a bat-and-ball block-breaker influenced by Taito's Arkanoid coinop of 1986. Megaball was programmed by Ed Mackey and drawn and composed by Al Mackey.
Refer to the Arkanoid article for the basics of Arkanoid-style block-breaker gameplay.
The bottom row of the above infographic shows the original 1991 version of Megaball whereas the top two rows show the commercial release of Megaball AGA v4.0 of 1995.
Most notably, Megaball ball behavior can be influenced by magnetism and gravity, which causes the ball to glide unconventionally and plummet towards the paddle. In addition, power-up capsules usually do not cancel each other out. For example, one can have an expanded paddle and twin-laser. In addition, the Expand power-up can stack twice with itself for a triple-sized paddle. The most notable "omissions" of Megaball are the lack of Arkanoid-like aliens and the lack of multi-ball disruption.
Megaball block-types include single-hit blocks, multi-hit blocks, switch-blocks, indestructible blocks, invisible blocks, self-replicating blocks, solidifying blocks and exploding blocks.
Megaball consists of 20 boards. Once the 20 boards are completed Megaball wraps back around to board 1 -- and capsules become question marks (?). My score after completing 20 boards on v4.0 was 30,289.
Megaball supports single-player or two-player alternating play.
Megaball Capsules
- Slow Ball (Arkanoid: Slow)
- Next Board (Arkanoid: Break)
- Lasers (Arkanoid: Twin-laser)
- Gravity Ball: activate gravitational pull
- Catch Ball (Arkanoid: Catch)
- New Quicksand
- Diet Pill (Arkanoid 2: Reduce)
- Kill (lose a life)
- Get a Life (Arkanoid: Paddle / 1-up)
- Expand Paddle (Arkanoid: Expand)
- Brick Through (Arkanoid 2: Armor-piercing)
- Zap Gold: Remove indestructible golden blocks
- Dynamite / v1.0: Music & Xtra Points
- Magnetism: activate magnetism
MegaBall requires 1 meg of RAM for all features. The original Megaball loads five music tracks into memory with 1 meg of RAM.
Indexes:
- Block-breaker Computer Games (Index to all Block-breakers)
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- History of Computer Games (Master Index)
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