Arkanoid Live

As the huge Proton drive of our home spooled down I sat nervously in the cockpit of the small explorer craft waiting for the main hangar doors to glide open. The vacuum distilled silence around me was broken only by the music which the Launch Chief insists on piping into the cockpits of all of the ships just before the hanger door is opened. Then I’m out.

The Planet hangs briefly before me before I’m sucked into a vortex of tormented space and left floating in what seems to be a bat and ball game! Well… that’s Arkanoid for you!

It does seem a strange piece of exposition for a game, but really, who cares? It’s Arkanoid! This is a classic, a piece of gaming history and the XBLA release has allowed me to recall fond memories of playing on the old Amiga 500 – the delights of getting the Laser upgrade, the pain of picking up the shrinky-bat-reducto-downgrade because otherwise you’d have missed the ball and lost one of those valuable lives.

The game itself has 4 ‘Episodes’ in the Arcade mode, each of which has 31 levels – that’s a total of 124 levels of gameplay to be had. Episodes 3 and 4 are locked to start with so you have to go through in ascending order, which sort of makes sense. The game options allow for changes to the number of players, number of lives -up to 7, type of life – that’s either new ships or a defensive field with multiple ‘hits’ below a single ship, difficulty level and whether Enemies are present. The Enemies are little more than an annoyance really as they simply float around getting in the way, but I guess everyone has a job to do! There are the usual 200 GamerPoints to be had and they are pretty well spread out, offering a decent reward for the efforts put in.

Playing the game is like a step back in time, I have to admit I found the background graphics a little intrusive on occasion and will probably get into the habit of opting them off in future but they’re impressive nonetheless. Gameplay is the same as it ever was, a mix of fun and frustration – why is it that that last block is ALWAYS a gnats nadger off the trajectory of every bounce??

Silver blocks take multiple hits to remove them and gold blocks are indestructible. It’s the gold blocks which provide me with the most frustration as some of the levels have the coloured blocks held within a maze of gold blocks into which you must direct the ball, usually through a very small gap! It’s especially frustrating that, when you do find the elusive gap, the ball hits some strange angle and pings straight back out at you! Grrr!

The only real issue I have with the controls are that the 2x speed-up (LT/RT) don’t seem to work, the 4x speed up (LB/RB) does, but to be honest annoyed me so much I never used it.