Strip Ball is, so we read on the title screen, a Digital Dream game. This Digital Dream label is rather obscure. Pouët lists a Hakkeridemo from March 1994, an MS-DOS demo featuring some basic oldskool effects like copper, dot landscape and Plasma. Digital Dream here stands for a group of young Finnish programmers. I doubt that they had anything to do with this game, since none of them used the handle Ron, it's a completely different platform, and the game lacks any demo effects.
Otherwise we find Digital Dream credited for some CPC slideshows featuring Ophélie Winter, Pamela Anderson, Sandra Bullock (from 1999?) and one called Generation Manga, from 1995. I have little doubt that these are the same guys as the ones behind our game, for essentially Strip Ball is a slideshow with some gameplay attached. (You can, in fact, enter cheat mode by pressing R any time, and turn it into a slide show if you want.)
The game aspect of Strip Ball is simply old-fashioned Breakout, just like in the original arcade machine and the first conversions for Atari consoles. There are no power-ups or gadgets, there are no different type of bricks, there is not even something like level design. There are just three rows of brick you have to clear. Once you have cleared enough (you do not have to clear all of them), you get to the next level, meaning the three rows are restored, your bat gets a little shorter, and a new pic is displayed on the left side of the screen. Once the bat has become so short that it cannot get shorter any more, the lines of bricks are moved down instead.
After some hesitation, I have decided to list Strip Ball as a French game. There is not very much hard evidence for this, since the identity of the programmer is shrouded in mystery, but it is highly probable. If you play or cheat your way all through to the end, the victory message you get is in French. Besides, few other countries developed a notable CPC demoscene.
Strip Ball may not be much of a game. But since Bob Winner, nobody had used the graphic capabilities of the CPC to such good effect.
