Should Have Let This Slide

Sun Herald

Sunday August 10, 2008

Eliot Fish

ARKANOID DS

Platform DS

Publisher Square Enix

Price $49.95

Rating G

VERDICT 2/5

ARKANOID DS is yet another remake of an ageing arcade game in the hope that those fond, fuzzy memories will make us open up our wallets.

It's a fun enough time-waster but the overall package is nowhere near as well-handled as Square Enix's other recent remake, Space Invaders Extreme .

Arkanoid is based on the classic brick-busting game, Breakout . You slide a paddle from left to right at the bottom of the screen to keep a ricocheting ball in play, chipping away at a formation of bricks at the top of the screen.

The game evolves by adding power-ups that affect your paddle (making it wider or allowing you to temporarily shoot lasers) and the ball (slowing it down or giving it the power to pass through multiple bricks at once).

The appearance of unbreakable barriers ups the challenge by forcing you to angle your shots into gaps to get at those last few bricks. To extend the game's lifespan, a Versus Mode for facing off against a friend is included.

While Arkanoid has a certain addictive quality, it doesn't have the depth of other classics such as Tetris or Pacman to really qualify it as a classic worth rediscovering. EF