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So. Arkanoid DS.

I received this from our fine friends at Play-Asia sometime in December, and the fact that I'm writing this in mid-March should tell you something.

Not that, when you cover Nintendo, there's a steady stream of mind-bogglingly great games sliding across your desk. Not that, when you are a real live professional games writer, you constantly need to put down games you want to play in order to play games people are willing to pay you to play.

No, it should tell you that Taito somehow screwed this port of Arkanoid DS up severely, almost beyond recognition. I love BreakOut in all its forms, I specifically love Taito's Arkanoid series, and I really loved the idea of the DS paddle controller. Yet, somehow, almost every single thing about Arkanoid DS is disappointing, and it eventually got the point where I couldn't bear to play it anymore.

Why, you ask? Well...

The Paddle Controller is the Death of Portability

So, the big gimmick for Arkanoid DS is the paddle controller, that slides into the DS's GBA slot. There are other ways of controlling the game, using the D-pad/buttons or stylus, but both of these methods are pretty lousy. You more or less need to be playing Arkanoid DS with the paddle controller. Yes, it consumes battery power even in sleep mode, but that's really not such a big deal. The highly questionable ergonomics are.

Using the paddle controller feels very good and the play control is nearly perfect. The motions of the in-game paddle map to the twist of the analog paddle as well as any arcade machine's ever did. The problem with the paddle is its tremendous size, compared to the average DS. You see, the most popular form of the DS is the DS Lite. I would be willing to be that, by far, most of the people reading this, and even most gamers in Japan and Europe own DS Lites.

For whatever reason, though, Taito chose to design the paddle based on the old DS Phat design. So, it's huge. If you stick it into the DS Lite that, well, most gamers own, it's a really awkward fit. As you can see in the above pic, it hangs out about a good half inch or so before the paddle part even starts.

The paddle ends up making your DS big and bulky when part of the charm of a DS Lite is having a portable you can easily haul around with you anywhere. The awkward fit also makes the paddle prone to coming loose during gameplay, and a few times it fell out while I was hauling it from place to place in my laptop case or purse. After awhile, I didn't fool with taking Arkanoid DS out of the house anymore.

Lousy, Lousy Soundtrack

Yes, I know, nobody plays Arkanoid to listen to music. Hear me out, anyway. Arkanoid DS tries to give the game structure in a way that is much crappier than usual. In the Arkanoid I recall playing, Taito gave the game some structure by throwing in some bosses and enemies. In Arkanoid DS, it's about... grinding for points, that you use to unlock assorted graphics options.

This means that Arkanoid DS's gameplay is highly, shall we say, repetitive. You get points by doing runs of seven "worlds" through story mode at a time. The way the levels are laid out means that, generally speaking, although there are 28 levels, you repeat about fourteen of those to a truly ridiculous degree. The "world map" for Arkanoid is laid out roughly as follows:

Z'V W X Y Z V'

P Q R S T U

K L M N O

G H I J

D E F

B C

A

Each world has five levels, so you beat Arkanoid with 35 levels. You have to about eight runs both for points and to unlock additional paddles and the "challenge mode" version of each level (which is usually kinda fun). The unlockable paddles look like your original paddle, but with crazy designer polka-dot patterns. A run-through took me around 45 minutes, so... well, that's a lot of effort for polka dots.

While you're grinding for polka dots, you have roughly a dozen songs to listen to. You can select which songs to listen to on the options menu... but, uh, with roughly a dozen options, you're going to get sick of anything pretty quick, even if it's great. Arkanoid DS has a lot of lousy songs that sound like third-rate Japanese synth-pop to begin with, so this game is just kind of a musical disaster.

Why is This Game so Ugly?

When Arkanoid is making you grind for points, it's so you can buy backgrounds to decorate stages with. You can also buy block shapes, frames, and all sorts of things for customizing the various levels. Until you do this, the game is hideously ugly. I mean...cripes, just look at it!

The problem is that most of the backgrounds and shapes and whatnot you can buy with your points are also incredibly ugly. A few feature shifting moving dots in the background, and so make the game actively harder to play. This decision is baffling-- why not just make the game not ugly to begin with? People generally like games that aren't ugly!

But this path was not for Arkanoid DS. Perhaps Taito thought that by making you grind for any sort of variety to your ugliness, you would appreciate the handful of attractive options more.

Grinding in my Arkanoid?

My biggest problem with Arkanoid DS, though, is the hideous terrible grinding. Yes, it has multiplayer, and you can grind in the multiplayer, and playing multiplayer Arkanoid is entertaining for all of five or ten minutes.

What you're effectively getting is a single-player game of Arkanoid with all of the joy sucked out of it. The challenge modes, where you have to meet special conditions while completing levels, are very fun... and, oh, look, you get them by grinding the story mode. You get everything by grinding, or entering secret codes to unlock extra game modes replete with more grinding for basic stupid things (and some levels that are almost kind of fun).

The grinding wouldn't be so bad if Arkanoid DS had good fun boards to play on, but they're actually... inconsistent. For whatever reason, Arkanoid DS doesn't even come close to using the entire screen for the brick-busting action. The "frame" for each board of bricks you have to break can be wide or narrow, but never really takes up more than maybe half of the available screen real estate (horizontally).

This makes the 92-pixel gap between the top and bottom screens a lot harder to deal with than it might be otherwise. Once the ball is going so fast, predicting where it'll emerge as it goes from one screen to the other becomes more a religious exercise than a predictive one. Of course, the ball picking up speed as you go is traditional to BreakOut clones and usually pretty fun, but most BreakOut clones take place on contiguous screen real estate. Breaking it up across two screens, and by the way there's empty space between the screens you can't see, is... well, lame.

Do You Want to Buy This?

Well, what do you think? Seriously, the only reason to spend money on this is so you can have something to play with the DS paddle controller. The controller itself is an interesting novelty and conversation-starter; shame it's so ugly and awkward, but the same could be said of most peripherals. Basically, unless you're an insane collector, give Arkanoid DS a pass. You can play way better BreakOut clones on just about any other system. Importing it is iffy and I can't think of why Square-Enix is even bothering with a US release.

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