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Breaking Out

A subgenre of Puzzle Games, often referred to as Breakout clones or Arkanoid clones.

In their simplest forms, you control a paddle at the bottom of the screen, which you use to bounce a ball to destroy blocks. If the ball is not bounced back, it goes off the bottom edge of the screen and the player loses a life. Powerups and enemies are common in these games, even though they were absent from the original Breakout.

Callbacks to classic arcade games often include segments like these.

Not to be confused with The Protomen song with the same trope name.

Examples:

Action Adventure
  • In the Raising Hell expansion-pack of Overlord, you get to play Breakout with a rolling, morbidly obese halfling... as soon as you finish taking him through the mini-golf course.
  • A Breakout-like minigame in 3D Dot Game Heroes is called "Blockout". Your hero's shield is the paddle, but you can use his/her sword to help propel the ball faster.

Action Game
  • Break Quest actually has a physics engine, so objects can bounce and spin in reaction to being hit as well as many other effects such as teathered or sprung objects, allowing for a lot of variety in it's level design.

Fighting Game
  • The various DLC for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces contain a minigame called Bind Breaker, where you use the ball to destroy the blocks that make up the characters' Barrier Jackets, stripping them down to bathing suits. Not for the more conservative of fans.

Platform Game
  • Lyle in Cube Sector has you fight a boss in this manner.
  • In I Wanna Be the Guy, there is a room where you must do this to open the path to the next room. Missing the ball—in this case Delicious Fruit—doesn't kill you, but it removes a block of the ground that you are standing on, revealing deadly spikes. Once you've cleared a path to the exit, you must then dodge the ball as you make your way out of the room, or else it will kill you.
  • In Vexx, one mini-game in Tempest Peak Manor, the fourth world, has you playing Breakout. ...On a GIANT-screen TV. ...Controling the joystick by standing on it.
  • Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, a NES title, inverted this trope. One of the minigames had a ball-spitting face trying to destroy a block wall Jackie was standing on. The player had to deflect the balls by punching and kicking them, to avoid the complete destruction of the wall.

Puzzle Game

Rhythm Game
  • BIT.TRIP BEAT uses it for a level boss.
    • BIT.TRIP FLUX combines it with Pong for another boss.

Role-Playing Game

Shoot 'Em Up
  • The very first Touhou game, Highly Responsive To Prayers on the PC-98, plays like a very strange hybrid of Breakout and a danmaku shoot 'em up. For one thing, you have to swat the ball away from Reimu, or else it will kill her...

Bizarre Puzzle GameVideo Game GenresFalling Blocks

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