347: Brick Archway

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Brick Archway

Title text: The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.

Explanation

Breakout is a game first created in 1976 and since which has gained much popularity and has been recreated in many different versions. In the game, the player controls a horizontal 'bat' at the bottom of the screen to make it move left or right. Above it are several layers of bricks which are destroyed when hit by the ball. The ball is not affected by gravity and will float around, bouncing off the walls, bricks and bat. The aim of the game is to keep the ball from touching the bottom of the screen (by deflecting it with the bat) long enough for the ball to hit and destroy all of the bricks.

Cueball's approach to the game is to actually stand underneath a brick archway and throw a tennis ball at the structure above him in an attempt to destroy the bricks. Naturally, the physics in the game don't work in real life, and the aftermath of Cueball's actions is that one of the bricks in the archway comes loose and falls onto Cueball's head, causing possibly fatal damage.

The sentence at the bottom of the comic points out the illogical nature of the game when compared to real life.

The title-text relates to a programmable calculator from the late '90s which (from memory) had a Breakout-like game pre-installed, or at least easily programmed into. It is apparently a mystery to Randall (and, frankly, to your current editor) how anyone gets anything done, these, days, with much more advanced technology where all kinds of time-wasting can be so easily had with the current level of trivially portable computing power. And now with added Internets! (Oh my gods, it's 4:30am...)

Transcript

[Cueball lies on the ground, underneath the titular archway, next to two halves of a brick. Dust falls from the place in the archway where the he knocked the brick from with the tennis ball. The ball, meanwhile, has rolled about a meter away.]

"Breakout" is a stupid game.

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Discussion

.........Dontknow (talk) 20:22, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Type "Atari Breakout" in Google image search. (I'm pretty sure it only works on pc.) Herobrine (talk) 12:56, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

The search results won't make it self-evident that you're talking about this —Kazvorpal (talk) 04:54, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

It also works on laptops. Beanie (talk) 14:19, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

NOTE, it no longer works. TheOddCell (talk) 02:23, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Extra Note, if you go type in Atari Breakout and click "I'm feeling lucky" it will work. Epicradman123 (talk) 19:02, 23 August 2024 (UTC)