Bunny Bricks

You shoot marbles from a cannon and use it to smash colorful bricks. Bunny Bricks is a straightforward puzzle where nothing gets complicated — aim, hit, move on. No deep strategy, no psychological thriller, just classic mechanics that ran a million times in the eighties and will keep running as long as we play it.

The game puts you on a clean screen with a pile of colored bricks at the top and a cannon at the bottom. You press a key, adjust the angle, fire away. The marble cuts through the stack and smashes everything in its path. Once you remove all the bricks, you advance. It's not more complicated than that, but it doesn't need to be — the nineties were full of games that knew what they wanted and didn't trouble themselves with unnecessary layers.

On a DOS-compatible computer, Bunny Bricks is playable. The graphics are bland and colorfully anemic, the sound I don't remember, but that's not a reason the game should be forgotten. The mechanics work — you manage to calculate trajectories, experiment with angles, sometimes you nail it even without the math. The further you go, the cleverer the brick layouts become. But after a few hours, you feel the game repeating itself. New levels are just different arrangements of the same content.

What's uninteresting about Bunny Bricks today was uninteresting in the nineties too. It wasn't a game you'd remember for its story, graphics, or music. It existed as a catalog piece, something between Tetris and Pinball, offered on disks packed with cheaper games. It was fine when you had nothing better to play.

Today only someone wanting to try what it was like will play it — hopelessly dull, but at least honest about it. There's nothing to be ashamed of if you want to test it in your browser. It's five minutes of nostalgia and then you move on to something more fun.