By Brad Cook

The objective seems simple enough: Bounce the ball off the bricks and destroy them. Clear the screen and move to the next level. Those of you who have been playing video games since the late 1970s are familiar with the concept, which began with Breakout.

But you haven’t played a brick-and-bat game like Vortex, which turns the action into a 360-degree affair, challenging you to spin your bat around circular rows of bricks, some of which require multiple hits to break. Sure, you can break bricks that grant power-ups, such as multiple bats or a power ball, but you’ll need them if you want to beat the time limit for clearing the level and earn bonus points.

Deceptively Simple Becomes Fiendishly Difficult

Start the game with five lives and a series of heavily-cracked bricks that take just one hit to break. As you progress to higher levels, you’ll encounter lightly-cracked bricks that need two hits to shatter, as well as solid bricks that won’t break until you bounce the ball off them three times. The shiny silver bricks won’t break no matter how many times you hit them, but you don’t need to clear them from the board anyway — they simply provide an extra surface for angling your shots.

Let the ball pass and your bat will vanish in a flash of flame, taking one life off your total. To help you avoid that, the higher levels also bring them with a bag of tricks, including bricks that explode and take out others around them and bonus bricks that drop power-ups you can grab: multi-bat; multi-ball; bat stretch; bat shrink; sticky bat; slower or faster action; and power ball, which passes through bricks when it breaks them, rather than bouncing back.

When you complete a level, you’ll earn two extra points for each second you came in under the time limit. Vortex tracks your historical scores, number of levels cleared, number of bricks destroyed, and number of bonuses received. For each category, you can view your best total, an average of your totals, and the number you achieved in your last game. If you need to quit during a game, you can easily save your progress and return to it later.

Need some help? Read on for our tips and tricks, as well as a few cheat codes.

Tips and Tricks:

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Vortex gameplay area.

Blast Those Bricks. The guns cheat in action.

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System Requirements

  • Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or Windows 2000
  • iPod classic. Not compatible with iPod nano, iPod (5th generation), the iPhone, or other iPod models. Please check which iPod model you have.
  • iPod Software 1.2 or higher
  • iTunes required to download (games cannot be played in iTunes)
 
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