Alleyway is basically Breakout or maybe Arkanoid, but it's not nearly as good as even those shallow block-busting games. The best version of this "puzzle" game is, of course, Kirby's Block Ball, but we're a long way from that. This is the Ardipithecus ramidus of Kirby's Block Ball, and even that might be giving it too much credit. In Alleyway, you bounce a very small ball with a paddle around a block-filled area at the top of the screen. You get points for breaking blocks, of course, and you lose a life every time you miss the paddle.

The unfortunate facts are that most of the stages are exactly the same, and appear to made from the same material as the Game Boy version of Tetris. The ball itself is also hilariously difficult to angle, far too often it will simply rebound off the paddle at exactly same (or directly opposite the) angle that it hit the paddle at, causing an endless feedback loop that drives you insane and makes it impossible to hit that ONE LAST BLOCK left. Alleyway is frustrating and should be avoided. Just wait until Kirby's Block Ball comes out, you know it will.