Rival Ball is the sequel to the PC Breakout clone DX-Ball 2 from Longbow Digital Arts.

As an added bonus, Rival Ball also includes the six demo board-sets from DX-Ball 2, with support for the five respective board packs from the game.

The difficulty levels range from Easy to Medium, Hard and Impossible, and will determine several factors for the game.

If the chosen difficulty is Hard, the game starts with the regular paddle size, but a small ball.

While all power-ups are absent in this mode, the game starts with the most narrow paddle size and a tiny ball fixed at the highest speed.

By enabling Time Limit, the player may compete against the clock with settings of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 minutes to complete a board-set.

In this mode, players take turns to clear a board-set, playing through the same boards successively, while competing to achieve the highest score.

With a 1-on-1 split-screen multiplayer mode, the majority of the game's board-sets are specifically designed to mirror horizontally at the middle of the screen.

The local player will then be busting bricks on the lower part of the board, while the progress of their opponent will be reflected on the upper half of the screen.

While the majority of these are direct clones from DX-Ball 2, Ice Ball and Chain Lightning are two new additions, replacing Falling Bricks and Level Warp.

Based upon the same engine as DX-Ball 2, the game recycles many of the original elements and programming by Seumas McNally (1979-2000).

[i] While the gameplay and design essentially remained the same, Rival Ball featured a cursor-based layout with buttons for navigation; new graphics for the power-ups; board designs with square shaped bricks; new sound effects; a new soundtrack; four difficulty settings and options to set timers, randomise board order and repeat board-sets; and most significantly: split-screen network play.

The update also installs MCEWrapper.exe for support under Windows XP Media Center Edition, and renewed the game's icon with a glowing blue ball.

Further, sporting the pun of allowing network play, Alpha-Net takes the player through the 26 letters of the alphabet, with correlating words spelling out.

If necessary, this file can be edited in Notepad, to add a new entry for the path where the DX-Ball 2 board packs have been installed on the hard drive.

As the same artist who wrote the songs featured in DX-Ball 2, Eric Gieseke provided seven tracks for Rival Ball under his handle SideWinder.

The soundtrack spans an overall euro-techno sound, featuring melodic tunes with a notable influence of house and trance music.

[3] Featuring true head-to-head gameplay, Rival Ball Tournament omits the split-screen design for a more competitive way of playing, similar to Pong.

Also unique to Rival Ball Tournament are the new board designs, here termed arenas, presenting a more free-form style with bricks of various shapes and sizes, as well as unbreakable obstacles like torches and towers.