Prima Materia

Prima Materia is a 1996 freeware action arcade game by Art Kerns of Scumby Software (art@scumby.com), an enthusiastic homage to the brick-busting classics Arkanoid and Breakout that ships as a public beta -- version 0.1.1 -- compiled with CodeWarrior.

Gameplay

You wield a paddle at the bottom of the playfield, keeping a ball aloft as it shatters bricks and incidental monsters above. Cleared boards reveal warp doors that let you pick which level to tackle next, lending a small dose of player agency to the otherwise linear breakout formula.

Power-Ups

Bricks occasionally drop goodies including fast balls, slow balls, a sticky paddle, a laser paddle, oversized and undersized paddles, plus a few random surprises -- enough variety to keep the 32 included levels from feeling samey.

Presentation

The 32 stages are dressed in colorful background textures and backed by digitized sound and music. Version 0.1.1 added support for higher resolutions and non-256-color depths, improved mouse control, and let players disable scrolling text and background patterns.

System Requirements

A 68020 or better is required (a 68040 or PowerPC is recommended), running System 7.0 or higher with Sound Manager 3.0. Recommended display is 640x480 in 256 colors with 5 MB of free RAM. The beta is not PowerPC native but runs cleanly under emulation.