For example, equipping your Vaus with lasers is no help at all if the blocks that you need to shoot are hiding behind an indestructible wall. Some of the level designs are truly fiendish toward the end of Clear mode, and many are designed in such a way that even power-ups don't help much. Additional variety and challenge come in the form of blocks that take two hits to destroy, blocks that move, and blocks that simply get in the way because they can't be destroyed at all. Given that they consist entirely of square bricks, level designs in Arkanoid DS are rarely much to look at, but occasionally the bricks are arranged to create pictures of everyday objects or recognizable characters from classic Taito games. Every world that you beat along the way unlocks two new worlds, and by the time you get to the last row, you can end the game with any of seven different worlds.
Each world is made up of five levels, and your goal is to get from the bottom of the pyramid to the top by taking any route you please. Thirty years later, at least one of the Space Invaders still poses a threat.Ĭlear mode consists of 28 worlds arranged in an inverted pyramid shape. You might think that having that many lives for every level makes Arkanoid DS too easy, but considering that the game doesn't stop or slow down when you hit a barrier, the real difference between this and previous games is just that this one keeps you playing at a more brisk pace. A number of energy barriers that span the bottom of the screen make it impossible for your ball to drop early on, but if you use one you lose one, so starting every level with three barriers means that you get three lives. Arkanoid DS does things a little differently: You get only one ball, ever, and if you lose it then it's game over.
Previous incarnations of Arkanoid worked like pinball in that losing a ball was the same as losing a life, and anytime that happened you just launched the next one until you ran out. You keep the ball alive by using your bat to prevent it from falling into the bottom of the screen, and the longer it takes you to hit all of the blocks, the faster the ball gets. Taking the controls of the Vaus (that's the name of your bat at the bottom of the screen-it's actually a spaceship), Clear mode tasks you with destroying every block in a level using a ball (some kind of sci-fi energy projectile, no doubt) that rebounds off of everything it touches without ever losing momentum. The lack of a paddle (you can import one) is disappointing and the D-pad option is best avoided, but the stylus works just fine.Īrkanoid's traditional Clear mode should be the first one you check out, given that visiting levels there unlocks them for use in the new Quest mode. Multiplayer options, new power-ups, unlockable audio and visual options, and the objective-based Quest mode make Arkanoid DS easy to recommend. Arkanoid DS, which comes to North America and Europe minus the paddle controller that it was bundled with in Japan last year, introduces a handful of new features to the Arkanoid mix but thankfully doesn't do anything that's detrimental to the classic gameplay.
Taito's bat-and-ball block breaker first appeared in arcades more than 20 years ago, and in the years since it has graced numerous home computers and consoles. Then there was Breakout, and 10 years later there was Arkanoid.
0 kommentar(er)
