ARKANOID Live! review

Recommended

by M.W. Moriearty

Atari's Breakout was released shortly after their industry-defining hit Pong as an attempt to translate the experience to a single-player format, and was itself an enormous success. Breakout inspired a wave of clones, copycats, and imitators, creating, as these things go, a new genre unto itself, the block breaker game. While Breakout itself has, much like most of Atari's early output, aged very poorly, many of its clones have fared better, and the best of them by far is Taito's arcade classic Arkanoid, directed by Akira Fujita and Hiroshi Tsujino. Arkanoid beefs up Breakout's simple premise of bouncing a ball with a paddle to destroy several layers of various colored blocks with the addition of such new features as power-ups that change the shape or abilities of your ball or paddle, a variety of different blocks with different strengths, and a progression of unique levels with distinct arrangements of blocks to break, culminating in an actual final boss to defeat. The whole thing is wrapped in a thin narrative involving piloting a spaceship through some sort of time warp trap created by a mysterious villain as an excuse for the addition of enemies and weapons to the formula. All the new bells and whistles serve only to expand on and diversify a core gameplay premise that maintains an old-school addictive simplicity. This port features graphical updates and both local and online multiplayer, along with a wealth of new levels and play modes. The various multiplayer modes, particularly the competitive versus mode, help breath some new life into the game.