At its most basic, Shatter is a Breakout clone: you move a paddle back and forth in order to bounce a “ball” into the play field where it will smash blocks. But Shatter adds some new twists and gameplay elements that make it different from every Breakout-style game that I, at least, have played.

First, when the break a block, it smashed into Fragments. You collect these Fragments in order to build up a power bar. How do you collect Fragments? By Sucking them in to your paddle. At any time you can pull one of the left shoulder buttons to Suck. And conversely, the right shoulder buttons Blow.

So it is Breakout with Sucking and Blowing. I pity the marketing team.

What makes this interesting is that when you Suck or Blow, it affects everything. The Fragments, the ball and (some of) the blocks. By using Suck & Blow, you can curve the ball’s trajectory (little hint marks on the edge of the playfield help with this). Basic blocks are fixed in place, but there are some special blocks that kind of ‘float’. Generally these are trapped by basic blocks at the start of a level, but once those ‘fence blocks’ are gone the floaters drift. If they drift into you, you lose a life.

So you need to use Suck to pull in the Fragments for energy, but not use so much of it that you start sucking all these floating blocks towards your paddle.

What’s energy for? Well, you do have a Shield that will protect you from incoming floating blocks, and that requires energy. But once your energy meter gets full, you can unleash a torrent of laser fire at the blocks. When you do this, everything slows down in a kind of laser bullet-time.

Shatter also has all kinds of power-ups dropping out of busted blocks, and a wide range of block types, from the basic and floaters I mentioned, to ‘rocket’ blocks, blocks that spawn other blocks, explosive blocks, and so on. The playing field is sometimes rectangular, sometimes circular. In the latter, about three fourths of the field will be surrounded by a fence that things rebound off of, and the last quarter is where your paddle roams, following the curve of the level.

Every few levels there’s a boss battle, which is kind of a new twist for Breakout games. Oh, and you can release as many balls as you want (well, up to the number of lives you have). But every time you lose a ball, you lose a life.

Shatter has PSN Trophies and Leaderboards for you Achiever types.

I’m no where near done with it, nor have I seen everything it has to offer. But for a mere $8 I feel justified in recommending it to anyone that’s enjoyed any kind of Breakout-like game in the past.

Here’s a video of the game in action (not mine). Skip the first 2 minutes or so to get to the actual gameplay. You can see the Sucking and Blowing as concentric arcs moving towards or away from the paddle. Notice how the ball trajectory curves in response to this. Since this is world 1, you won’t see a huge variety of blocks, unfortunately.

Shortly after the Sony PSP launched, industrious hackers started figuring out how to run homebrew apps on it. From then until now, Sony kept patching the firmware to lock out the homebrewers, and the hackers kept working around the patches. Sony’s message was clear, if ineffectual: thou shalt not homebrew.

Today, the Playstation Blog breathlessly announces that No Gravity: The Plague of Mind will be coming to the PSN tomorrow. In a very ernest attempt to part us from our dollars, the blog says, without a hint of hypocrisy, [No Gravity] hit the headlines for the first time in 2007 as a “homebrew” game for the PSP. It was acclaimed as a game that “puts tons of retail games to shame with its incredible polish.”

So apparently homebrew is evil and vile… unless suddenly Sony has a chance to make a buck off it.

I have to admit, I only got a little ways into it before I had to jump up and go buy the game for myself (it’s only$5). I love bizarro stuff like this.

I finally pulled the trigger on Burnout Paradise. When the game first came out I played the demo and liked it, but I didn’t like it $60 worth. When it hit $40 on sale I was really tempted but still held out. Now, for $30, and all the additional content they’ve released for is since release, and no need to scrabble around looking for a game disk when I get the urge to play, I figured it was time.

Unfortunately the PSN network isn’t ever superfast for me, and tonight it’s seeming extra special slow. I started the download but don’t expect it’ll be done before bedtime tonight. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to log in to WAR!

In fact at this point the only bad thing about it is the price of the full game. Are they really asking $30 for it? I need to actually check the store because that just seems too steep. At $20 I’d definitely pull the trigger, but $30 is a bit too high.