DX-Ball 2 20th Anniversary Edition: Blast Thru boardset

Back in my high school years I entered a phase where I begun relentlessly binging Breakout and Arkanoid clones. If you've been to my blog in the early to mid 2010's you may be familiar with my discussions on Aquanoid and Electranoid in particular, which were DOS-based and in the case of the former I created roughly 450 levels (but couldn't really share them due to the obscurity of the title and how the custom levels were formatted). This, however, is nine/ten years later and I've moved on from the great Breakout binge, especially with all of their assets now on The Spriters Resource thanks to yours truly. Still, there was that one Breakout game that I never really delved into, the DX-Ball games.

Created in 1996 and followed up by a sequel in 1998, these were Breakout clones based on the Commodore Amiga game MegaBall v3.0, featuring a wide play field, dozens of  levels, a colorful palette of blocks, and a range of helpful and not-so-helpful powerups. Recently, the sequel got a full digital re-release on Steam, titled DX-Ball 2: 20th Anniversary Edition, and it'll be most of the focus of this blogpost going forth.

Except, it's not the only focus. Not long after the initial release of DX-Ball 2, another breakout game launched in 1999- called Blast Thru. This game seemed to take a lot of inspiration from DX-Ball 2, including the playfield sizes, block types, and especially the powerups on offer. Unlike DX-Ball 2 which continued to be sold through even the 2000's and 2010's, Blast Thru became abandonware after its publisher folded and the game can easily be downloaded in full.

After getting my hands on the Anniversary re-release of DX-Ball 2, and since the games were very similar to begin with, I went and did a full conversion of Blast Thru's 40 levels using DX-Ball 2's built-in editor.

The result was a full-on near-perfect re-creation with only relatively minor differences. The biggest difference was the area in which blocks could be placed- it reaches to almost the very bottom in Blast Thru but in DX-Ball 2 it's several blocks higher, so many of the levels were changed to accommodate for the reduced available space for placing blocks. There's not really much else to describe, considering both games' heavily similarities to oneanother.

You can get the Blast Thru boardset here.