Tuesday 8 February 2011

Game Gallery #4

Arkanoid (1987)
ZX Spectrum Version featured. Arcade version reviewed here.

As with many games of its time, Arkanoid was born in the arcades, but the version I spent by far the most time playing is this fine conversion for the Speccy. It doesn't look quite as nice, as you might expect, but it's got it where it counts. All stages and features from its arcade parent have been squeezed into the 48k of memory and mercifully it's even a little easier, awarding the player with four lives from the start rather than two. Having said that, I still doubt that I could've finished this game without the aid of the 'PBRAIN' cheat. So, thanks to that splendid bit of foresight by the programmers, I can present all 33 rounds of Arkanoid!







































 

4 comments:

  1. Great post and nice to see all of the levels together. Might do something similar on the C64 one day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arkanoid looks gorgeous on the Speccy, doesn't it? Loads better than Revenge of Doh and its ball camouflaging backgrounds.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Stiggy and Marc. Yes, the sequel made me realise they were right to leave the backgrounds out of this original. The scrolling background in particular freaks me out!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I do like the look of it on the Spectrum. The Famicom version looks a bit different.

    I kind of like this one better than Arkanoid II. Maybe its just because I played this one when I was a kid.

    ReplyDelete