Arkanoid

The Good
Being a simple bat and ball game, it's difficult to really improve upon the concept. What is Breakout will pretty much always remain Breakout.

What Arkanoid does is update the concept through presentation, and the CPC version hits the mark. The graphics are colourful, clear and as varied as one could hope for, the action (what little there is) is fast, and the musical interludes make great use of the AY chip - the introductory piece on starting a game is particularly great.

Essentially though, it's Breakout, and if you're after that you can do a lot worse.

The Bad
On the down side, it's tricky and not just because of design.

For a start, there's a huge difficulty spike in the form of level 3. Faced with a screenful of indestructible blocks, you'll be fighting against poor collision detection as the ball takes improbable bounces off horizontal rows, stumping the player and sending him praying for a level skip power up. It gets more forgiving, but a lot of the time you're relying on trial and error in order to clear each screen.

And, like any Breakout clone, it's very repetitive.

The Bottom Line
In the end, Arkanoid is a pretty damn faithful port of an arcade classic, and one of the better Breakout clones out there. It makes for a nice showcase of the machine's sound chip as well, but it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

The Good
Arkanoid is the best game of its kind ever. The most memorable game I played on the XT, I truly love this little gem. Faithfully converted from the arcade, Arkanoid PC version actually has far better gameplay -- beter controls and no money-spending. What more can you ask?

With reasonable graphics, great controls, excellent leve design and Martin Gallaway's memorable musical piece, Arkanoid is one of the better games I ever played. I actually completed it on the Amiga a couple of months ago -- with a score of 920420 points! Beat that!

The Bad
It ends...

The Bottom Line
One of my favorite games and all around best breakout clone. Only game that comes close to it is Popcorn...

The Good
Arkanoid is essentially an evolution of a 1980s game called Breakout, which goal was keeping track, with a platform, of a bouncing ball and use it for break blocks above the platform. However, Arkanoid wasn't a simple graphics and sound evolution, but also a gameplay evolution!

In Arkanoid, it was possible to obtain power-ups, like many arcade games at its time. One good power-up is multi-ball, in which player keeps track of three balls instead of one; another power-up is catching, in which player can catch the ball and press fire to release it. There are many other power-ups, like slow down, lasers and platform shorter.

The Bad
Arkanoid isn't an original idea. It was cloned from Breakout, although this was also a good game! Besides, levels are sometimes very hard, which makes gaming experience worse.

The Bottom Line
If you like Breakout, get and play Arkanoid! If you didn't play Breakout, it's worth to get and try Arkanoid. However, if you don't like Breakout nor Arkanoid, please don't swear me either, because it's a fact that both games are good. Just see the critics.