PixlBit

I just realized that Air Fortress was actually NES #155. NES #154 was Super Glove Ball. The less said about that game right now, the better (although I would play a sequel if Microsoft made one with Kinect 2.0... they still own Rare, you know).

At the moment, I have Arkanoid in my NES, and... well, it might be in there for awhile. Now, I know what some of you may be thinking: oh, it's just one of those brick-breaking games, so it's not going to take that long to get through. But you would be wrong. Dead wrong.

Except for Temperance, who's already proven his savviness to the game's insanity by way of his comment on my last post...

Arakanoid probably has about as many clones as the Biblical patriarch Abraham had descendants, and from playing them, you might not expect much challenge from the original game. However, the arcade game, as well as its NES port, are both incredibly difficult to beat, the latter easily being one of the hardest games for the systems. Three factors contribute to this: the relative lack of game-breakingness of the powerups, the speed of the ball, and the lack of a continue feature (cheat codes aside).

Sure, the laser power-up lets you rip through blocks like butter, but none of the power-ups stack, meaning that you'll lose sticky-paddle if you get multiball, or whatever. There's also no power-up that makes the ball pass through multiple blocks to destroy them, only bouncing if they hit the walls of the playfield; that convenience is, to the best of my knowledge, only found in some of the clones. Even if you have a laser paddle, though, you'll still have to juggle the ball while you shoot, and that thing can fly once you start getting further along. In fact, the ball probably starts about twice as fast as it does in many of the gentler clones, keeping the pressure on you from the get-go. Add to this the limited number of lives and you've got a serious workout on your hands.

Oh, and I should probably mention one other thing: those freakin' gold blocks. Observe the level above: It doesn't look particularly hard, but knocking out those later blocks requires some obscene precision or luck with the power-ups. Gold blocks are indestructible, meaning that getting past them to other blocks will require you to bounce your ball at just the right position and angle; miscalculate, and the ball will simply ricochet several times and come back to you, faster than before. And again, this is level 3. Out of 36. Thank goodness the difficulty isn't on a steady curve.

Playing this game, though, has brought back memories of Arkanoid-style games from my days as a shareware lover, back when I didn't have the cash to blow on a large collection of retro games. Among these was Tronic, which was developed by Webfoot Software, who made some interesting 2D stuff before going through an awkward 3D phase and eventually moving on to a bunch of crap nobody cares about. Oh, and Dragonball Z: The Legacy of Goku. I don't really remember much about Tronic - I think I'm getting it conflated with Twinblok and one other Breakout clone of theirs - but it was decent stuff, all things told. Sadly, they've disowned their DOS catalog, but you can probably track down some of their stuff somewhere. I'd recommend Interpose and DROD, personally, although the latter is now in the hands of Caravel Games for some reason (try the Architect's Edition if you're looking to not spend money).

Anyway, I have no idea when I'll beat Arkanoid, or if I'll pass it for something else in awhile. In the meantime, I'm probably long due for another game acquisitions post... I've had some interesting pickups in the past several months.