Crystball

Crystball holds a special place in handheld history as the official pack-in game for the Watara Supervision, serving as the system's "ambassador" to new owners. Just as Tetris defined the Game Boy and Alex Kidd defined the Master System, Crystball was designed to show off what the Supervision could do right out of the box. Naturally, as a budget console's flagship title, it chose the safest, most recognizable genre possible: the "bat-and-ball" brick breaker.

The gameplay is a direct, unapologetic clone of Atari’s Breakout or Taito’s Arkanoid. You control a paddle at the bottom of the screen, bouncing a ball upward to shatter layers of bricks arranged at the top. Clearing all the bricks allows you to progress to the next stage. To keep things from becoming too repetitive, the game includes a variety of power-ups that drop from destroyed blocks, granting you abilities like an elongated paddle, multiple balls, or a "sticky" surface that lets you catch and aim the ball before relaunching it.

Because Crystball was the pack-in title, the developers at Bon Treasure clearly spent extra time optimising it for the Supervision’s hardware. It is widely considered one of the most playable games on the system because the movement is primarily vertical. While the Supervision’s screen is famous for its "ghosting" (blurring), the predictable path of the ball and the static nature of the bricks make it much easier on the eyes than the system's side-scrolling shooters. The sprites are thick and high-contrast, ensuring that even when the ball picks up speed, you can still track its position against the four-shade grayscale background.

The presentation is remarkably polished for a Supervision title. It features a catchy, albeit lo-fi, 8-bit soundtrack that plays during levels - a rarity for a library where many games are played in near-silence. While it doesn't reinvent the wheel, Crystball is a solid, addictive arcade experience that proved the Supervision could handle basic action competently. For many kids in the early 90s, this was the only game they owned for the system for months, and fortunately, its simple "one-more-try" loop made it a perfectly respectable introduction to the hardware.