MSNBC wrote to let us know about Newsbreaker, their Arkanoid clone + news. They call it an "educational online game" -- it takes RSS feeds and drops them into the background, behind the bricks. When you hit certain blocks, the headlines drop down, much like Arkanoid power-ups.

The game has high production value and it's actually a decent Arkanoid clone, if a bit slow to start. But I can't help but think that Newsbreaker is poorly conceived. If it is a "newsgame," it's certainly one of a different kind than the ones Gonzalo and I have been advocating for. And frankly I'm happy to see more intersections of games and the news, although I'd never have built such a game myself. The problem here is in blending the dynamic of Arkanoid with an RSS reader. The best strategy in break-out type games is to get runs of brick hits between paddle collisions. But when you do that in Newsbreaker, swarms of headlines flow down all at once. It's already hard to read the headlines and still hit the ball when there's just one headline, but when there's ten it's impossible. And call me old fashioned, but I still like to read the actual news story sometimes. To do so, one has to catch the story and then click it in the sidebar. Weird.

I think what the creators were going for here was a more interactive RSS reader, wherein the gameplay affords the collection of articles that the player then wishes to read later. But the whole thing seems like a kind of uninspired Rube Goldberg contraption. All in all, a clever idea that didn't quite work out.