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macuna's Arkanoid (NES)
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| [February 8, 2007 11:00:32 PM]
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The second round of Arkanoid began with the words "I will make it to level three if it kills me." I am happy to say that, thanks to determination and a little bit of luck, I did. However, I found that the most challenging aspect of level three was the proximity of the first row of blocks to the paddle. Even at the initial low speed of the ball, it was really hard to keep up with it, and the extreme angles at which the ball would bounce made it impossible to win.
After I was satisfied by reaching this high level, I kept playing for the sheer addictive fun of it. I found one sneaky little rule about the boundaries that offered an interesting affordance. Along the sides, there are objacts that appear to be doors. One time, I stumbled completely by accident into a door that I did not realize was open. It then teleported me to the next level and gave me a 1-up. That made it easier to progress, because I ended up skipping the end of level one and starting level two with some lives to spare.
This time around, I also bothered to watch the cinematics before the game. As basic as they were, they did introduce a sense conflict (other than simply "The blocks must die!") to the game. Apparently, the paddle is a ship that escaped from the wreck of the mothership Arkanoid, and is now trying to escape some kind of twisted scenario. So, destroying blocks is my way of escaping to safety.
Overall, I found this game to be really fun, really addictive, and frustrating beyond reason. The game is so simple, which gives the player the impression that it might be easy. However, so many erroneous moves are made that look like they could have been preventible, it's hard to resist the urge to give it just one more try.
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| [February 8, 2007 09:55:04 PM]
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After the first 45 minutes of play, I found that arkanoid is as addictive as it is challenging. The object of the game is to bounce a ball (or balls-more on that power-up later) back and forth between the paddle, which serves as the player's avatar, and a wall of colored blocks. When the ball strikes the brightly-colored blocks, they disappear. When the gray blocks are struck, they remain after the first blow, and then vanish like the others after the second blow. The goal is to destroy each increasingly-difficult arrangement of blocks to advance to the next level.
I really like the level-ups in this game. They make it both easier and harder at the same time. For example, everytime I got the laser powerup (enabling me to shoot twin laser shots from the paddle to destroy blocks while waiting for the ball to return) I found that the advantages of this added firepower mitigated my ability to concentrate on the most important part of the game, namely making sure I didn't miss the ball and lose a life.
For a novice player like myself, the reward system of points awarded for objects destroyed seemed relatively meaningless. My main goal was to stay alive long enough to see the second level. Getting to the high score of 50,000 did not seem very attainable, since mine usually ended up around 10,000 or so. The one or two times I did make it to level 2 were fleeting victories at best, since I consistently did so with only one life remaining.
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macuna's Arkanoid (NES)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 8 February, 2007
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