Play By Play - Alleyway
By Brian • 20 August 2024
- Year
- 1989
- Platform
- Nintendo Game Boy
- Notes
- Alleyway was a launch title for the Game Boy.
Heeeeyyyyy! What happened to Golden Axe Warrior?! Is this a retro-gaming bait-and-switch?
Rest assured, readers. Our adventures in the kingdom of Firewood will continue as soon as I have time to settle on the sofa for at least an hour and a half, graph paper and notebook in hand. Lately, this has absolutely not been the case—kids, summer illness, travel, and responsibility have all contributed to a rash of non-gaming-related activity. Consequently, playtime has been limited to brief sessions of Stardew Valley (and maybe a few lengthy, but muddled sessions when I was sick, but that’s a story for another post) and this little gem that managed to find its way to Nintendo Switch Online in recent weeks. Let’s talk about Alleyway on Nintendo Game Boy!
When I first got a Game Boy, my must-have game was Donkey Kong ’94. After that, it was Final Fantasy Adventure, the Super Mario Land games, Link's Awakening, and so on. The classics, the can't-miss, quintessential portable installments of my favorite franchises. Alleyway? I saw it in ads all the time, along with Solar Striker and probably Golf and/or Baseball. It was tempting, sure. As an 11-year-old with a stash of birthday money, I had an astounding ability to talk myself into buying just about anything, and I learned some pretty early and well-deserved lessons in buyer’s remorse, as a result. But even back then, I dismissed Alleyway outright. That's just a Breakout clone, I thought. I have one of those on my dad's computer.
Here I am, thirty years later, with a tendency for brief, but intense obsessions with arcade games and high-score chasers. My kids are asleep. My wife doesn’t have the emotional capacity to watch a TV show with me right now. It’s close to my own bedtime, so my options are pretty limited. Of all things, Alleyway appears on Nintendo Switch Online. It was inevitable. These games always come back to find me, one way or another, and I am justifiably in a position in which I am compelled to oblige.
Do we all know how Breakout-style games work? Alleyway would be considered a Breakout clone, or maybe a derivative would be a less-condescending term. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s like one-player Pong. The player launches a ball at a bunch of blocks at the top of the screen, and moves a paddle back and forth at the bottom of the screen to deflect the ball into the blocks over and over until they’re all gone, and the player moves on to the next level. If the ball goes off the bottom of the screen, the player loses a life. It’s destructive, addictive fun, testing both mettle and reflex. Alleyway works approximately the same way, with some extra features thrown in to make it unique in the block-breaking world, like additional rows of blocks that drop from the ceiling on some levels, or horizontally scrolling lines of blocks on others.
I dug in, and found that we must first explore the greater lore and context of Alleyway. As the game begins, I was taken aback by a little opening sequence of Mario jumping into the paddle. Hey, buddy, what are you doing here? Now, I know Mario has a lot of jobs—plumber, kingdom savior, star multi-sport athlete, multi-sport referee, construction worker, typing instructor, you name it. This one, however, is the one that strikes me as odd. What’s going on here in Alleyway? Is he in a sewer? In an actual city alley? Why do the blocks need to be broken? How did Mario get into this mess?
I went to my failsafe for the answer: the instruction manual. The manuals have been godsends for these old games with limited in-game context. They helped me through Rygar and Crystalis in a big way, for example, providing story beats, maps, and explanations of the many bizarre item pickups. Finding a scan of the Alleyway manual online, I found...no story information. I did learn some gameplay tips and that the game includes 32 levels, but I still have no idea what’s going on here. Does it even matter? Yes, because I have a problem.
I checked the box art next. Aha! Here’s something useful. “Cruise the Alleyway! Slam energy balls to destroy the Vid-Grid!”
And then, the back of the box. Oh, the motherload of context, at last:
To be honest, I still don’t really know what any of that means. I guess I have to let it go. Where did Mario get this spaceship? I mean, besides parked in the garage with his submarine, airplane, go kart, flying carpet, and other vehicles. Are the space grids the threat, or the energy ball? What is the Alleyway?! How did—oh, forget it.
I guess I should stop being a lunatic and talk about the actual game, huh? Despite my best, but gone-awry efforts to dive into the complicated lore and meaningful backstory of Alleyway, there’s a fun and competent block-breaking game here. The gameplay is simple enough—I don’t really have to think or strategize. I can turn off my brain and depend solely on my reflexes to deflect the ball, leaving me enough bandwidth to interact with Amanda on the sofa while she sends me Instagram reels for later or watches YouTube absent-mindedly. While it is a simple experience, the variety of levels and level types keep it interesting, and the Mario-themed bonus stages are enticing and good for lots of points, maybe netting me an extra life to keep me playing that much longer.
The first 8-12 levels always give me the false impression that I’m going to breeze through the entire game, but the difficulty ramps up in a major way after that. The addition of unbreakable blocks to the playing field (er, alleyway) creates major obstacles to my ball deflections. I can breeze through the entire first third of the game without losing a life, then lose three on a single level. Bested by the Vid-Grid—the ultimate shame in portable gaming.
The reason for my struggles? I have simply not mastered the physics of this game. I get stuck in loops. No matter what I try to do differently, I hit the ball at the exact same location with the exact same trajectory over and over again, which is especially frustrating on the timed bonus levels, where it’s important to rack up as many points as possible in the allotted time. Instead, I’m over here hitting the ball into the same lanes I cleared five deflections ago. I’m in command in the alleyway? Hardly.
I wonder what it was like to play Alleyway on original hardware with no saves or passwords. I frequently take a long time to clear a level, long enough that I’m not sure I could have finished the game on a single set of double-A batteries. Then again, I’ve never even made it to the halfway point—I bet really good players can master the game physics and clear levels with remarkable speed and ease. Surely there’s at least one nut on YouTube with all the secrets.
Anyway, that’s Alleyway! Thanks for indulging this little detour. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of these in the coming weeks, as my schedule continues to not solidify in any capacity.
- Was I a Bad Enough Dude to finish Alleyway?
No - Is Alleyway Bad Enough to play again?
Yes
Thanks for reading, and see you next mission!
Game Boy Ad Image Credit: TheAlmightyGuru
Alleyway Box Art Credit: MobyGames
