This is stuff that could be done on a 2600, and in fact, it was. It met my wildest dreams…and then exceeded them. Quest mode was a cute and unexpected feature that should please even the most curmudgeonly gamer.Īll this in one DS cart with a MSRP of $19.99? What a great deal! I honestly couldn’t ask for more in this cart. Almost all the boards are completely new and the Puzzle Bobble mode of the game works exceptionally well with the game. I was super impressed with all the things crammed into this new version of Arkanoid. You can also change the background, the board frame, unlock new music tracks, and even change the appearance of your paddle (Vaus). The first thing I unlocked was something that turned all the blocks in the game into the Space Invaders critters. You also earn points for playing Clear and Quest modes, and you can use those points to unlock all sorts of things to give you a totally customized Arkanoid look. Next up is Multiplayer, which is great because your friend doesn’t need to have an Arkanoid game cart to join in! All they have to do is be in range of your DS.ĭon’t have friends nearby but you still want some pvp Arkanoid? The game has it covered with Wi-FI mode.įinally there are things like options, and a way to track all your high scores. Instead there is a tiny box that simulates what the computer is doing and it’s hard to see, and worse, if you do try to look at it, it usually distracts you from the actual game. This is a little weird because you don’t actually PLAY the computer. Com, which is where you do battle against the computer to see who can finish a level first, or alternately, who can finish off one specific colour from the level. Most of these are pretty easy, but it’s great for a quick (and I mean QUICK) game. Here you’ll play that level with a twist such as “Take out every yellow block in 60 seconds” or “Only let the ball hit your paddle ten times.” If you achieve the goal, you beat that quest and receive unlock points. Once you have done this, it’s game over.įor each level you clear in Clear Game, you unlock a variant of that level in Quest Game. Repeat this process until you have beaten seven rounds, or 35 levels. Here you’ll clear a round of five levels, and then you can move on to one of two diverging paths. The main mode for Arkanoid is called Clear Game and it is laid out exactly like Puzzle Bobble. So does Arkanoid hold up after many years of being locked away from North American gamers, or should the title have been left unseen and unheard? Just please ensure that Bub and Bob do not meet the same hideous fate as the Valkyrie Profile games, okay? So a big thumb’s up for taking a chance on Arkanoid Square-Enix and showing us that you’re taking ownership of Taito seriously and giving American gamers a chance to see why they were one of the biggest companies of the Atari and NES generations. For many gamers, this will be their first chance at ever touching this title. Plus the last time Arkanoid was remade was over a decade ago for the PSX, and neither of those releases ever left Japan. Sure Arkanoid is basically a fancy version of Super Breakout which is in turn a sequel to Breakout, but it’s still a great deal of fun. I remember it was one of my first and favorite NES games and I was super happy to hear that a remake of the game with all new puzzles was hitting the DS. There are not a lot of versions of Arkanoid out there, but it is still a popular classic. Arkanoid though? That’s a different story. Space Invaders is one of the most famous games of all time, and somehow with over fifty different versions of the game, it still sells with each new face lift and port. We had a pretty good Bubble Bobble game come out for the DS this year (albeit it not even slightly touched by Square-Enix) and now Square is publishing two Taito remakes for the DS: Space Invaders Extreme and the game we are reviewing today: Arkanoid.Īlthough I would have preferred Puzzle Bobble 1 & 2 being ported to a DS cart, this makes a lot of sense. But then, maybe that is a good thing considering the horror that was Bubble Bobble Revolution, the last game actually developed by Taito before the buyout. My fear was that we would be seeing a burial of Taito titles the same way we haven’t seen a Ogre game since Knight of Lodis thank to Square’s purchase of Quest. Taito, one of the oldest video games companies of all time, with a pedigree of titles like Bubble Bobble, Puzzle Bobble, Space Invaders and more is now a subsidiary of another gaming company that was a merger of two other companies to begin with. I hated that Taito became a “Square-Enix company” and the game manual and box repeatedly reminded me of this new reality.
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