DX-Ball 2 demo

by: Longbow Digital Arts

Publication date: 1998-12-16

Topics: Breakout clones, breakout clones, single-player games, multiplayer games, Windows games

Language: English

NOTE: Three files necessary for playing DX-Ball 2 are missing in the upload, specifically Audiow32.dll, DXBall2.exe, and MCEWrapper.exe. They are intentionally left out in this upload because at least three antivirus software have flagged them as malware. With the files coming from the Longbow Games website and several video game and tech critics reviewing the game, I strongly believe that the detections are false positives. Unfortunately, the Archive cannot override any false positives, and I am only allowed to upload what passes all antivirus software on the VirusTotal website. Meanwhile, you can download the missing files on the Longbow Games website in this archived snapshot, where I downloaded the other files. I decided to upload them today because the files I have been holding onto on my computer were driving me crazy being left there.

Hello, I am FreeMediaKids!. Do you rememeber a time when the App Store did not exist and the Internet was the ultimate standard through which independent developers wrote and distributed what they believe are the best of free games. So do I, but maybe not the younger generations after me or those who were not part of the freeware scene of the 1990s and 2000s. Like the App Store after it, the Internet hosted games that were pretty A-quality. Of course, also like the App Store, we had losers, but that did not stop winners from being downloaded millions of times and passed on in the form of PC magazine disks. One of them was DX-Ball, based on the game MegaBall for Amiga. The two games are clones of Taito's Arkanoid, which in turn is a clone of Atari's Breakout. Recall that Breakout had a simple board consisting of eight rows to be cleared two times and had players simply returning the ball with their Pong paddle, with the real challenge coming in as the ball's speed increases and the paddle is cut in half. Arkanoid has 1750% as many boards of varied designs and introduced mechanics such as power-ups, tougher variants of bricks, falling objects from the ceiling to add difficulty, controlling the direction of the ball with where it strikes the paddle, and not cutting the paddle in half when a top brick is struck. MegaBall did away with the falling objects, but it does have larger boards and add invisible bricks to compensate in difficulty, music, and twice as many power-ups for a total of fourteen. Unlike Arkanoid, which forces the player to carry only one power-up at a time, here the player can carry multiple. The power-ups are represented as icons and include one for smashing through bricks without them reflecting the ball, as well as bad ones such as the one that destroys the player's paddle. Version 3.0, on which DX-Ball seems to be based, introduced combustible bricks and came with a Board Editor, with version 4.0 introducing more tiles for a wide variety of possibilities. If Arkanoid is to Breakout, then MegaBall is to Arkanoid.

That is where DX-Ball steps in. The freeware game has four power-ups and its own board editor, and the power-ups now move side to side. The game comes off as outstanding because everything about it is "right", with great boards, great graphics, great physics, and great sound effects, having been downloaded millions of times. Naturally, a sequel followed in 1998. This sequel expands the power-ups to twenty and its color palette to High Color, adds a "Kid Mode" difficulty setting and backgrounds, features a total of 150 boards to smash through and a Euro-Techno soundtrack by Eric "Sidewinder" Gieseke, ray-traces the ball in real time, and even offers multiplayer mode with up to four players, though only in turns. This game also has its own sequel, Rival Ball, both of which are commercial titles, but with a download count of over five million, DX-Ball 2 is the sequel to one of the greatest freeware games ever made.

Because Longbow Digital Arts (now Longbow Games) is still selling DX-Ball 2, which one can now get on Steam, for copyright reasons I cannot upload the full version of the game, but I can upload the 24-board demo version I obtained from an archived snapshot of the game's website. I say "archived" because, unfortunately, for some reason it seems to be no longer available on their website since 2018, the year the company released the 20th Anniversary Edition of the game. It works flawlessly on Windows 11.