This is something the coin-op game never had, and it's a hoot.
Quest mode asks you to perform certain specific tasks within the levels you've already conquered in Clear mode.
Sometimes they're gathered rather drearily, but often they're designed to portray a recognizable entity (such as an invader from Taito's Space Invaders) or arranged cunningly to force you to perfectly aim that danged ball. To keep things fresh, the formation of blocks varies from level to level. The single-player game takes two central forms, the most important being something called "Clear." Here, you meander through the standard levels, trying to clear all 140 of them. Alternately, by lowering both, even a no-reflex buffoon can handle it. If you instruct it to remove the barrier - which acts as a temporary safety net - from behind your Vaus, and if you hike up the difficulty level and increase the game's speed, the only thing to save you from doom is an unearthly set of reflexes. Still, like the control scheme, you will get used to it.Īrkanoid DS is a challenging game. This makes gameplay feel a bit stilted, and can impact you negatively when the ball is moving quickly. But, either through faulty design or simply the mechanics of the DS system, the ball temporarily - very temporarily - disappears from view every single time it transitions from one screen to another. Granted, using both screens is probably the best idea given that squishing the entire game surface onto a single screen would force most people to whip out a magnifying glass. More annoyance can be found in the two-screen Arkanoid approach. (There is an official analog knob controller add-on for Arkanoid DS, but it was only released in Japan.) Ultimately, you'll get used to the stylus, but it's just not the same. And you'll always feel the Vaus is just a fraction of a second behind where it should be. You can't live that magical connection between man and machine. The best of the two DS control schemes, the stylus, does the trick, but you can't spin a stylus and grab it again like some sort of Fonzie wannabe just when the timing is right. Yet neither approaches the elegant perfection of that coin-op knob. Instead, you can choose to use either the d-pad (not recommended) or the DS stylus (much better). In the DS version of the game, you don't have that. It was weighted, it moved fluidly, and it was the quintessential Vaus companion. When you played the original Arkanoid coin-op table or standup game, you controlled your Vaus with a single, rotating knob. It is instead in the hardware - or rather, the lack of it. That said, the Paddle Controller makes it so much fun that I kind of don't care.The most notable hitch has nothing to do with software. Hopefully things get more difficult in the later stages, or Quest Mode's challenges are tougher, because so far Arkanoid DS is a piece of cake.
The combination of a very wide paddle and very narrow stages means that it's almost harder not to hit the ball. I haven't been challenged in the slightest, thus far. My favorite is the one that makes the ball pass straight through bricks when it takes them out, rather than rebounding. Of course, all the awesome power-up items that make* Arkanoid *the gold standard in block-breaking games are all there, from the lasers that let you shoot out bricks to sticky paddles and everything in between. While it seems a bit shoehorned in, it's nice to have something to listen to other than "beep." Lots of trippy trance sounds, repeated bursts of vocals, etc. What you'll probably notice right off the bat is that while the graphics look pretty standard, the music seems pulled straight out of Lumines.
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