Arkanoid

Bat and Ball
August 1987 (Taito)

You know what the problem with Arkanoid is?  It’s just weird in all the right ways.

Let’s start with the genre.  I originally was going to go with Arcade because it doesn’t really fit anything.  Unlike Bust-a-Move¹ and other shoot stuff in order to clear the screen type games, you can’t just sit back and plan your shot.  You still have to react to way too much for me to think it’s strictly a puzzle game.  Puzzle influenced?  Easily.  But that’s not the same thing.  Luckily I looked online to see if the story was there instead of having to open the manual again and found something about the bat and ball genre.

On a totally narcissistic note, the special controller really messes things up because it changes the box size².  Outside of that though, the controller is great because it gives you a more arcade correct experience due to it giving you the ability to move your ship either quickly or slowly.  The regular controller still works, and is what I used.  But the ship has two speeds that way: go and stop.

One of my least favorite powerups splits the ball into 3 balls. I hate it because it makes me suck.

The fact that there’s a somewhat plausible story for this game still amazes me.  In my mind there are two types of games that don’t need a story.  Fighters are all about the fighting and if they have a story it’s usually pretty stupid or obviously thrown together because someone thinks every game has to have one.  Puzzle games don’t need one either for about the same reasons.  I almost counted sports games in there, but the story is that your team is playing a season.  Ok, maybe that does make it three types of games.

The story here is that you control a ship called a Vaus that escaped from the mother ship, Arkanoid.  Your goal is to fight Doh and escape the deadly space labyrinth so that you can live in peace.

That’s instantly better than Athena, where we had to forget about way too much reality even for a video game.

In theory, Arkanoid is a simple game.  Bounce the ball into the blocks and make them disappear.  Gold blocks can’t be broken and are just there to be a pain in the ass.  Grey blocks take multiple hits to break, with the number of hits needed going up as you get to higher levels³.  Essentially block colors other than that don’t matter.  Different colors do get you different amount of points, but since the same color blocks always appear in the level and you have to get rid of them all anyway, I don’t think the different point values really matter.

To contradict what I'm saying to the left, if you skip levels you won't have the "correct" amount of points for the level you're on.

Just with destroying the blocks, there’s a set number of points you’ll have at the end of the level.  Thankfully there are also obstacles floating around that give you more points if you destroy them.  Even better, you can destroy them either with the ball (which then bounces off just like if it hit a block) or with your ship.

Powerups here are mostly useful.  In the screen shot above you can see the one that splits the ball into 3.  Once that happens it doesn’t matter which ball you keep going as long as one of them is there.  Or you can be like me and try to save them all at once and wind up missing everything.

You can also have your ship grow horizontally, slow down the ball, get an extra life, catch the ball instead of just hitting it, warp to the next level, or get laser power that lets you shoot blocks instead of having to knock them with the ball.

The problem with the powerups is that they replace the one already in effect.  For the most part I’m fine with that.  I don’t expect to be able to have a longer ship and laser power, although that would be pretty cool.  My problem is that the order you get the powerups in matters a bit too much.  For example, let’s look at what happens if you get the slow down and laser powerups.

• If you get the slow down before the laser, the ball stays at the slower speed and you get the lasers.  Pretty cool because it gives you more time to shoot things.
• If you get the laser before the slow down, you lose the lasers in order to make the ball slow down.  This sucks.

I’m not sure if this was how things worked in the original arcade game or if it was a change that had to be made for the NES.  I fully understand that you shouldn’t be able to double up powers to the ship.  But you can make the ball extra slow, or slow down 3 balls.  To be fair, you have to keep the 3 balls no matter what just because it would be terrible to be following a ball only to have it disappear in order to slow things down.  But the order of the powerups shouldn’t matter if both can coexist peacefully.

One of my favorite things about "Get rid of all the stuff on the screen" type games is when the developers have fun with the shapes that they make.

Really though, despite the fact that some levels can be evil the game is quite fun.  One example of evilness is the screen shot to the left.  Yeah, you have a cute space invader.  You also have to hit most of the blocks in this level twice.

The thing that I think is really missing here is a way to continue.  No Kid Icaris style passwords here. Not even an option to continue from that level if you want to start again right there. The game does let you hit A and Start at the beginning of a level in order to go to the next one. But you have to do that before play on the level really starts, and you can only get to level 16 this way.

If you get the game today, chances are you’ll have to use a regular controller.  It’s what I used, and it works just fine.  Although I do have to admit that I would have loved using the controller designed for the game.  If nothing else, this is the only  game that had a controller designed specifically for a certain game.

All in all, it’s a fun game.  Not without flaws, but everything has those.

1. We’ll get to that if I decide to continue this into the SNES era. [↩]
2. I just got the home page fixed up so that it would show the entire box instead of the autocropped thumbnail. [↩]
3. Twice in rounds 1-8 and going up 1 every 7 rounds, ending with 5 hits needed in rounds 25-32. [↩]

Other Things to Check out

• The Legend of Kage
• Elevator Action
• Stadium Events
• Slalom
• Raid on Bungeling Bay