Cosmic Ball

Cosmic Ball is an enjoyable space-themed game in which users must break bricks by bouncing a ball off the hull of their spacecraft. There's not a whole lot to it, but it has enough different challenges to keep it interesting through many levels of play.

The game's interface is basic and arcade-style, with the player's spaceship capable of moving back and forth but not up or down. Users launch a meteor (ball) from their ship in order to destroy a formation of bricks in front of them. Some of the bricks contain helpful features that users must catch to take advantage of, including extra lives, fireballs, and missile launchers. Once all of the bricks are destroyed, the player advances to the next level, which is of increasing difficulty; users may encounter bricks that can only be broken from the bottom or other spacecraft that fire at them. The main activity of the game--bouncing balls off your spacecraft--remains the same throughout, but there are enough new challenges to keep it interesting. We had trouble tearing ourselves away from it, and we made the mistake of offering it to a friend, who advanced through more than 32 levels before he finally died. Overall, we'd say that the game could provide hours of mindless entertainment. It comes with a Readme file that explains its features, but for the most part it's quite intuitive.

Cosmic Ball is free. It installs desktop icons without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.