Arkanoid (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
257A playthrough of Taito's 1987 puzzler/Breakout game for the NES, Arkanoid.
Played using the Taito Vaus controller.
As probably most people who played it in one form or another in the late 1980s can tell you, Arkanoid is a bonafide classic.
It's an updated take on Atari's 1976 game Breakout, which was essentially Pong but played against a wall of bricks instead of a second player. In Arkanoid you control the Vaus, a spaceship that acts as your paddle, bouncing a little white ball around until you've destroyed every block on the screen. But for as simple as it sounds, Arkanoid throws plenty enough into the formula to keep things interesting. Enemies float around waiting to mess up your shots (and they often succed), but power-ups regularly rain down from smashed bricks to help even out the odds. Some of these items can extend the length of your paddle, while others might give split your ball into three (more firepower!) or slow it down (easier aiming!). My favorite has got to be the laser guns that attach themselves to the sides of your ship. They make pretty quick work anything you fire at - just don't get too distracted by the bullets and lose track of your ball!
The NES port of Arkanoid is my favorite of all of the home versions, and it all boils down to one simple reason: the Vaus controller. It's about the size of a standard NES pad and features a single fire button and a spinner dial. The thing that makes the Vaus so awesome is that the spinner uses a potentiometer to grant the game a fully analog control scheme.
The dial's travel is limited by hard stops once you've turned it far enough to the left or right, and these stops line up with the edges of the screen. This allows you to accurately read how much you should turn the dial in order to meet the ball, and it allows you to reposition with lightning speed. The game feels okay with a d-pad, but once you play it with its dedicated controller, there's no turning back. The difference is night and day.
The game looks and sounds good (especially for a 1987 release!), the few NES-exclusive stages are a nice touch, but the gameplay is what will keep you coming back again and again.
It's simple yet addictive, and the gameplay mechanics have been beautifully reproduced on the NES. And though it's a costly bit of obscure hardware, a Vaus in hand makes Arkanoid one of the most fun arcade-style games of the NES's library.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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