Arkanoid

Arkanoid is an arcade game developed by Taito in 1986. It expanded upon Atari's Breakout games of the 1970s by adding power-ups, different types of bricks, a variety of level layouts, and visual layering and depth. The player controls the "Vaus", a space vessel that acts as the game's "paddle" which prevents a ball from falling from the playing field, attempting to bounce it against a number of bricks. In Japan, the Gamest Awards gave it the Silver Award for being one of the four best games of 1986, along with Taito's own Bubble Bobble, Sega's Fantasy Zone and Tecmo's Rygar. In Europe, it was reviewed by Clare Edgeley in the December 1986 issue of Computer and Video Games, where she compared it to Pong and Space Invaders in its simplicty and addictiveNESs. incredible!" It named the NES version the Best Arcade Translation for the console that year, praising the graphics and play mechanics. The game was reviewed in 1989 in Dragon #144 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The NES version of Arkanoid was originally packaged with what is considered one of the rarest of all NES controllers, the Vaus Controller: a small gray controller featuring one button, a small spinner , an adjustment port, and the Taito logo. A Macintosh version was released in 1987 and a port was released for the TRS-80 Color Computer in 1989.