Arkanoid

Credits: Arcade original by Taito; Atari ST conversion published by Imagine Software, with Peter Johnson handling programming, graphics, music and sound.

When it comes to bat and ball games / Breakout clones / brickbuster games - call them what you will - to me, Arkanoid was and still remains the most iconic of them all. Sure there are more recently games with flashier graphics, slicker power up systems or whatever... but somehow, Arkanoid remains firmly lodged in my brain as the definitive game of the genre. For me, that all started with the Atari ST version that was part of the Summer Pack bundle. I was somewhat aware even at the time (I think) that this was a coin-op conversion, but I can't recall ever actually seeing the arcade machine anywhere. Apparently it used a rollerball / spinner for control rather than a joystick, which is why the mouse controls immediately felt right - and any attempt at keyboard / joystick / gamepad controls feel just as immediately wrong with this type of game.

As far as I can tell, just one man - Peter Johnson - was behind the entire conversion - and what a conversion is is! (In fact his name is persistent throughout every screen in the game, so I guess it's pretty fair to say he made it solo and was - rightly - proud of the job he did.) Okay we'll ignore the feeble attempt at giving the game a background story (obviously not Peter's fault in any case) and come straight to it - from the moment you begin playing, Arkanoid is a perfect example of the old "easy to play, difficult to master" adage.

Unfortunately, what's also been difficult to master has been getting STEEM to accept mouse control on certain games  - not sure what I'm doing wrong (as I thought I remembered playing this before under emulation) but whatever settings I try, it just won't have it. Ironically, this means the perfection of the controls mean I can't currently offer you any screenshots or gameplay videos of my own. But... er, I did manage to record the short intro sequence with the aforementioned iffy storyline and video compression appears to have butchered the sound a bit, but we retro gamers are made of stern stuff and remember having to wait 5 minutes for games to load from tape on the 8-bit machines, so I'm sure we can also weather this storm.

So I'm afraid I'll have to go completely from memory. Well really, once you've played one Brickbuster game, you've played them all - to an extent. The basic aim is the same - destroy the bricks, stop the ball from dropping off the bottom of the screen - but with Arkanoid we got the perfect combination of fantastic controls, varied levels and power-ups, polished visuals and crisp sound effects. Finishing a level was always a satisfying experience as you watched your paddle... er, spaceship, "Vaus", slide off the right-hand side of the screen through a portal that mysteriously opened when all the bricks were destroyed. Conversely, losing through mistiming or poor placement was tragically heart-rending (and often led to untrue cries of "stupid controls!" or "lousy mouse..."), but this just fed into the "one more go" appeal of the game, apart from the very occasional rage-quit. 

The game had 32 levels plus a final boss level of some kind (not quite sure) in total - it is with shame to admit that I admit to never having completed it - I definitely came close a couple of times, my memory is very sketchy on this but I feel like I reached level 28 or possibly even 30 and was extremely annoyed when I lost my last life! As was fairly common with coin-op conversions, you could insert new credits when you died, so you weren't limited to 3 lives - but obviously, there was a limit to this.

Really annoyed that, for now, I can't get STEEM to recognise the mouse control as this is definitely a game I would happily play again - it's a truly of those truly timeless games.

So here's a screenshot of me... unable to move, as the ball nears the point of no return and a power-up falls aimlessly to the side... weep for me. This is all I can give you at this moment.