Off the Wall (Atari 2600)

Breakout was still a break out hit when the Atari 2600 hit the scene and small iterations to the title’s brick-breaking formula would keep coming out for years. Atari even got in on toying with the core concept a bit, and by giving the game a coat of Japanese paint, they hoped to create a Breakout clone that was different enough to justify a purchase despite being a somewhat familiar game.

 

Off the Wall starts by giving you a few difficulty choices, those being Peasant, Student, or Master, and the option to play with one or two players. Despite being framed as difficulties, these are almost akin to the game’s stages, with Peasant, Student, and Master all containing sets of four playing fields each. If you start on a lower difficulty and do well enough, you even move up to the next difficulty, although the biggest difference to be found in the difficulties is that Peasant doesn’t immediately throw the annoying bird enemy into the mix. Once you start a round of Off the Wall, you’ll see you are playing as a small man named Lu on the bottom of the screen. Lu is the stand-in for Breakout’s paddle and not the best substitute honestly, as when the square pixel representing the ball comes towards him, he’s not totally reliable in his task of hitting it away from the bottom of the screen. Lu will lift his staff if it comes in from above and there seems to be a tad bit of leeway in that it can bounce off of it while it is at his side, but mostly it just means you don’t see the true length of your paddle save when it is in action, making it a bit difficult to gauge if you’re standing in the correct spot. Too many times you’ll end up seeing the ball slide down the side of Lu because you weren’t able to tell the staff was slightly too small to bounce it back. Much like most Breakout games, once the ball gets past that paddle, you’ve lost, but Off the Wall does give you a few lives to ensure things won’t end too quickly. A poor salve for the fact the ball mostly slips past you due to the game’s quirks.

The issue with the staff colors everything else in Off the Wall poorly, and that’s a shame, as there is certainly potential to this Breakout clone. The bricks at the top of the screen you are meant to break aren’t cleanly segmented, meaning that when the ball hits into them, it can do a surprising amount of damage. You still might end up with tiny bricks in odd spots that you just can’t seem to hit, but clearing the field can go a lot quicker since you can get a good bounce going that will devastate the upper area. This task is further enhanced by the addition of power-ups, although how good they are fluctuates and the flickering when they appear on screen makes it a bit difficult to decide if you want to risk grabbing what you only have a few frames to identify. Zig Zag will make the upwards path of your ball move back and forth, a path that rarely helps and will likely lead to a death as it still will come back down normally. The question mark power up is a mixed bag, adding points, giving extra lives, removing the pesky Blackbird, or potentially screwing you over by speeding up your ball, but it’s mostly worth going for because of the good payouts. The remaining power-ups are all certainly boons, with the player able to get a larger paddle, a more powerful ball that breaks more bricks, or a magnetic ability that will let them guide the ball around with ease. Every power-up save the ones that give you points or lives are temporary, so you can wait out the bad ones and have to try to make the most of the good ones while you have the chance.

 

The power-ups make the basic brick-hitting a touch more interesting and varied, but most of the work they do to make Off the Wall more interesting is undone by two factors: the Blackbird, and random speed increases. The Blackbird is a flawed idea, but it’s not hard to see where it came from. The bird will fly just below the area where the bottom bricks will appear, trying to follow Lu’s movements with only a bit of a delay. Not only do you have to now make sure you are in the right spot to hit the ball as it bounces back, but the Blackbird will also do a very good job of intercepting hits if you aren’t trying to specifically hit it away from the bird. It can technically help a bit by keeping the ball in the upper area, but most of the time it is an annoyance who is a bit too capable and hinders the enjoyability of the basic brick-breaking gameplay. It feels like an unnecessary complication to a simple game with a few issues already, and those random speed increases independent of the negative power-up make it even worse. For no real readable reason, the ball sometimes just gets a burst of speed, evoking unpleasant memories of games like Super Bee and Catch the Ball, but it’s not quite as absurd or unforgiving as in those titles. If the playfield is open enough and you’re lucky, you can keep the ball in play, although the Blackbird exacerbates it by sending it back without giving you enough time to properly react. Oddly enough, this speed issue pairs poorly with an inverse issue with how long it takes to come back from a death, as it lingers on the start for a fair bit before throwing the ball back into play and letting you continue.

Luckily, despite the bad addition of the Blackbird, there’s another creature on the playing field that helps enhance the game and make it a bit more possible. You can clear bricks to beat a level, but there’s another means that is a bit more reliable that involves a so-called dragon at the top of the screen. Looking a bit more like a caterpillar, it worms its way across the top, and once you’ve cleared a path to it, you can hit it with your ball to make it disappear. After a short bit of time, it will reappear, and you can hit it again. Do this enough times and the game advances, although the amount of times you have to do it does make it a challenging task on its own. The magnet power-up is a great help for it and the game can be about trying to keep your ball in the upper area more if you’re going for that kind of win, and considering the interference of the bird and the speed issues, the dragon can often be your best bet for a victory. It is, unfortunately, an out for engaging the more problematic elements of the game design, but again it shows the promise the game had before a few too many things were added and we ended up with a muddled mess instead of a decent Breakout variation.

THE VERDICT: Off the Wall was a promising Breakout clone with an Eastern theme and a few nifty elements like power-ups that can help or hurt play. The dragon that can serve as an alternate win condition to just clearing the play field of blocks made it unique, but Atari just had to keep adding elements to try and set it apart. Because of the need to be more different, we got Lu’s unreliable staff instead of a paddle, a Blackbird who is a nuisance rather than an interesting obstacle to overcome, and the unusual propensity of the ball to just speed up to nearly unmanageable speeds, likely due to some fault in the coding. While Off the Wall would have likely been an average Breakout clone with the few changes that do work, the detrimental ones drag it down to be an inferior alternative that will more often frustrate a player than entertain.

 

And so, I give Off the Wall for the Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. Losing for reasons outside of your control does not feel good, and even if you do learn to tolerate the Blackbird, the random speeding up of the ball means a good run can be sabotaged at any moment, and Lu’s unreliable staff only further makes it likely you’ll lose because the game just made it so. Off the Wall is a battle of squeezing enjoyment and progress out of the moments where things work and praying that you won’t lose when suddenly factors you don’t have much say in spring up and dominate play. Brick-breaking games usually do have minimal involvement from the player, essentially positioning them as the least reliable surface the ball can ricochet off of, but you should still be the most important factor in success and failure. You can’t anticipate the speed-up and it may crop up at a time where it would be impossible for you to react, so once you realize that issue, it’s hard to say the dragon and the power-ups really make this game worth a visit.

 

Trimming the fat and adjusting some of the wonky mechanics would put Off the Wall on the right path, but a simple game can be easily sabotaged by a few parts that just don’t work reliably. There is promise in the ideas, and it might be easy to avoid the bigger issues in a casual visit to the game, but for a long term Breakout substitute, Off the Wall is too off-base.