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Thursday 8 February, 2007
After the first 45 minutes of play, I found that arkanoid is as addictive as it is challenging. The object of the game is to bounce a ball (or balls-more on that power-up later) back and forth between the paddle, which serves as the player's avatar, and a wall of colored blocks. When the ball strikes the brightly-colored blocks, they disappear. When the gray blocks are struck, they remain after the first blow, and then vanish like the others after the second blow. The goal is to destroy each increasingly-difficult arrangement of blocks to advance to the next level.
I really like the level-ups in this game. They make it both easier and harder at the same time. For example, everytime I got the laser powerup (enabling me to shoot twin laser shots from the paddle to destroy blocks while waiting for the ball to return) I found that the advantages of this added firepower mitigated my ability to concentrate on the most important part of the game, namely making sure I didn't miss the ball and lose a life.
For a novice player like myself, the reward system of points awarded for objects destroyed seemed relatively meaningless. My main goal was to stay alive long enough to see the second level. Getting to the high score of 50,000 did not seem very attainable, since mine usually ended up around 10,000 or so. The one or two times I did make it to level 2 were fleeting victories at best, since I consistently did so with only one life remaining.
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