Alleyway (Game Boy) Review

I love games to be emotionally evocative or tell an interesting tale or make me think about the world around me in a different way, but sometimes that yearning to play a title that is nothing but its structure and system pops its cheeky little old-school head up. Alleyway scratches that particular itch in much the same way the concurrently released Tetris does, asking you to complete a seemingly straightforward task, remove blocks from the play field by firing a ball at them, constantly returning it to avoid losing a life until the entire field is cleared.

One of the original line-up of titles available at release for the Game Boy - designed by Gunpei Yokoi and from the newly formed R&D1 - the focus of Alleyway is to provide the kind of raw satisfaction that only comes with hand-eye co-ordination merging with muscle memory. It's the therapeutic physicality of repetition, eventually leading to success, that wins over the player locked in that delicate mental state between concentration and day dream.

Reviews at the time were largely negative, stating that this was a half-hearted attempt from Nintendo to copy an already ageing genre of arcade game that was started by Atari in '76, and it's not unfair to say that R&D1 did little to change up the thirteen year old formula. There are no power ups of any kind to be found here for example, something Taito had introduced three years previously with Arkanoid and would come to be a standard within the sub-genre. SEGA's arcade release Gigas featured background art at around the same time and in '88 Cascade's little known TRAZ had simultaneous two player and included a construction kit. If anything, Alleyway was a backwards step from the advancements being made in a world where arcade experiences were still relevant.

Yet Yokoi's streamlined homage was still a well realised port. Holding the B button slows the movement speed of the paddle and pressing A speeds it up, providing a greater fidelity of movement for a digital input method. Play format is broken up into four patterns; the first a normal structure, the second scrolling horizontally, the third gradually advancing towards the player and a bonus stage in which the blocks form a sprite from Super Mario Bros. In this final pattern, the ball's properties change so that it tears through blocks instead of rebounding from them, destroying them all and thus conferring a point bonus for high score chasers. In addition, after four levels the paddle shrinks once it touches the top of the screen, significantly increasing the challenge.

Also similar to Tetris is the focus on smooth, single screen play with minimal visual effects and unlike its puzzler counterpart, there is no soundtrack during a game either. This minimalism leaves the participant to the task at hand, finding beauty not within flashy effects but in the purity of player versus machine.

Though the Microvision beat Alleyway to the punch with a Breakout clone in the palm of your hand, the mechanical improvements and better feel of the Game Boy puts this outing in another league to MB's version, while still confirming that Breakout works best on the go, due to its instantaneous accessibility. While there may have been "better" and certainly more complex iterations of the genre, the hardware upon which it appears, coupled with its back-to-basics approach, should ensure Alleyway a deserved place in the collections of Nintendo fans.