Arkanoid for iPhone, photo by Nathan Barry
One of my favourite old school games from the Commadore 64 era has found a new home in my pocket, courtesy of Tatio’s latest remake - Arkanoid for the iPhone and iPod Touch, available now from the US iTunes App Store for $4.99 and for £2.99 in the UK.
For those that haven’t played it before, the game is basically a fancy version of Breakout - you move your ‘Vaus’ ship left to right to bounce a ball up to the lines of bricks and knock them out one by one. There is a pretty lame backstory to explain what’s going on - the Arkanoid mothership is attacked and sends out the ‘Vaus’ on a recon mission to see what’s what, but it gets sucked into an inter-dimensional blah blah blah - but that’s really just uneccessary fluff and can be skipped over quite quickly.
Cover for the Atari ST version of Arkanoid, used under fair use via Wikipedia
The game takes the basic idea of Breakout and expands it by adding various power-ups ranging from enlongating and reducing your paddle width to multi-ball and a laser to blast away the bricks quicker. The level designs add some visual appeal and differing degrees of difficulty to the gameplay, and there are additional little ‘enemy’ ships that get in the way and add a bit of randomness to the path the ball can take.
I remember to original being one of the first games to take advantage of a new (at the time) way of controlling the onscreen action - the mouse. This made it much more responsive than the traditional joystick set up and allowed you to move the ‘vaus’ from one side of the screen to the other at great speed, much more like the paddle of the arcade version. This was especially useful if you happened to catch the ‘gate’ power-up, which jumped you to the next level, as you could just slide the mouse quickly to the right and not have to worry about the ball coming down before you got there.
It seems appropriate then that this new version is again making use of a relatively new input device - the iPhone’s touchscreen. To play, you simply hold your finger on the marker just below your craft and the little ship will follow your movements across the screen. Occasionly, I kept finding that my finger had strayed upwards and obscured the Vaus.This was a bit annoying, but I can’t have been the only one to do it as the controls still worked, and had obviously been designed to.
The first level of Arkanoid
A lot of the level designs seem to be exact copies of the originals. I remember so many of them so well (including the Space Invader one) but others may well be new. One of my all time favourites is still there. It’s bottom row is made from the ‘metallic’ blocks (which take a couple of hits to remove), all except the the last one, which also doesn’t have any blocks in the rows above it. A carefully aimed first shot can take it out. Get the ball back up there and it’ll start bouncing around taking out block after block. Luck out and catch a ‘disperse’ power up (the multi-ball) and you can rest, safe in the knowledge that the level will pretty much finish itself.
One thing that has been improved is the progression through the levels. Rather than simply going from a to b to c as in the original, the new version has adopted an inverted pyramid, branching structure, which will greatly improve the replay factor as you can take a different route and find other levels you might not have played before.
And one thing that has definitely gone in the other direction is the background music. Actually, I can’t say that for sure as I can’t remember what the music used to be, but I’m sure it wasn’t the lame euro-techno-disco-trance it is now. You can get around this by choosing your own tracks from the options screen, but this seems a little limiting. It would much better to just let the iPod play in the background. The FX are perfectly fine, adding a nice plinky-plonk to the music and the power-ups now announce themselves with a nice 80s Cylon effect.
A nice addition to this version is a versus mode which is pretty much Breakout x Pong. Two players, each with their own Vaus go head to head on the same screen with a few troublesome blocks getting in the way of pure Pong action.
Overall, it’s a great bit of retro gaming fun from the days when simple gameplay was more important than fancy 3D graphics and is well worth the $4.99/£2.99.
