Boink¬ut
Never twice the same,
Never once very different.

BoinkOut is a yet another variation of a classic arcade game.  The objective is to eliminate the bricks; a futile quest, as the computer will simply create more.  You should try and prevent the balls from touching the bottom of the window; when this happens you lose gumption.  If you lose too much gumption, you lose a life.  Fortunately, BoinkOut rewards good karma with extra lives. 

When you start BoinkOut, you are in game mode.  There can only be one game window, and it will pause when it is not the main window or when you click on it.  You can also open one or more demo windows.

BoinkOut has five different kinds of bricks:

Wimpy Bricks
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Hit them once and they go away.

Double Bricks
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These bricks can be very obstinate.

Magic Bricks
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When you hit a magic brick, something weird will happen.  Sometimes it will be good, sometimes it will be inconvenient.

Permanent Bricks
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These bricks will never go away.  You will often wish they would.

Moving Bricks
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Just like permanent bricks, except they move.

The Boink-O-Meter
The Boink-O-Meter is a curious device that tests the wimpyness of both the player and the computer.  BoinkOut was designed to be played with a Boink-O-Meter setting of 1.0, but good players may wish to increase the difficulty by selecting a higher setting.  Wimpy computers will not be able to deliver the goods at high Boink-O-Meter settings.  Indeed, 68030 systems probably won't even be able to deliver a true setting of 1.0...

Other Curious Things
The sounds in BoinkOut are all in stereo.  With a good set of headphones, BoinkOut makes an excellent meditation medium.  BoinkOut has its own set of background pictures, but you can load in a different default picture, if you prefer.  You can also temporarily load a different picture using the "Background/Load Pic..." menu item, or by pasting a TIFF or EPS image in.

I originally wrote BoinkOut as a graphics demonstration on the Atari ST.   The NEXTSTEP port was done largely to demonstrate what a great game machine the NeXT computer is...

Special thanks to Ali and Keith for the examples and tools that made this easy!