Arkanoid

I got out the tools and I bought some new drill bits and things and bored a couple of new button holes inside of the thing to install a spinner, a paddle.

Because I wanted to play stuff like Arkanoid and Camel Try properly.

Right.

It's a real ass accurate spinner.

I think we can make a game out of this.

So I turned to her and I said, all right, what game do you want? If you could play any game with these glasses, what would it be? You want Pong, Arkanoid, Pac-Man? She goes, I want Guitar Hero.

And I want it with Taylor Swift songs.

Because she's eight.

Exactly.

The fourth game I'm going to compare today between the ST and the NES is Arkanoid.

Arkanoid, Taito's power-up-filled and incredible update of Atari's Breakout was released into arcades in 1986.

The NES version was released with a special paddle-style controller in 1986, and the ST version in 1987.

Taito ports are especially strong on the ST, and this one is no exception.

The NES American release was also published by Taito, and sits at number 211 out of 663, or in the top one-third of all NES games released, according to Moby Rankings.

The Ultimate Guide to NES Games ranks it at 9 out of 10, and the All Game Guide gives it 7 out of 10, calling it a marvelous port.

The ST version of Arkanoid is a classic on the system and one of my all-time favorite games.

That is such a clean way to code.

Now, the next idea is the arcade clone, like Breakout or Arkanoid.

The forums suggest this specifically to learn instant static meshes.

Right, because spawning a grid of bricks sounds simple, but it introduces draw calls.

That's so cool.

You get a little Arkanoid style game or Breakout style game with little power-up.

You can paint, and it, it's basically Snake, but it's paint, a paint roller, and you, you know, paint all the spots that you can.

There's Whack-A-Mole.

It's a riff on pachinko, but of course every board can have the p- the, the pegs in different places.

Um, it sort of also has, you know, something in common with, like, Arkanoid, in that you're aiming, uh, where the ball's going to go.

Um, in pachinko I don't think you have a lot of control over where the ball goes.

There might be variants of pachinko where you have some control.

Sometimes they're like drawings.

There's one that's, that looks really like a pachinko board with the, the diang- like the diagonal, or the triangle rather, where it's, you know, one peg at the top and then it, like, it can fall down all these other different ways.

The Arkanoid part was the kind of launching that I was thinking of, and then it kind of bounces around, like it would also do in something like Arkanoid.

Um, but you don't have a way to, like, bounce it back in.

There's-

There was that little Arkanoid knob, uh, add-on as well.

Yep.

[laughs]