Well, I've been noticing more and more shareware type games coming out that are great for an arcade cabinet. I found one today, and thought I would write a review.
Brixout XP
What do you get with the Demo?
You get one world (of 5) and you can play 2 levels.
A great game of Arkanoid is always a good thing. The first time I played a game like that was the original little breakout for the AppleII (that you had to type in yourself). Then the arcade came out and did pretty well... Then clone after clone. Someone might let me know which was the first incornation, but I first played it on the Apple II.
Well, what about this version?
I was excited to see a great 3d version of arkanoid come out. So I quickly downloaded it.
The installation was painless. It also is completely controllable from a mouse and one button, so you can add it to an arcade machine with no troubles.
Next, I ran it. It was very very pretty. You can see the balls rolling, and it seems to roll in the proper direction. The rest of the screen looks great.
So I start off playing and quickly quit out and degraded the resolution and brought it down to 16bit. Why? It was running slow... then I found out it always seems to run slow. It didn't get faster as you are playing.... what? At least for the demo, when your playing the ball rolls at the same speed.... this sucked. I ended up hoping to get the ball speedup powerup (that I'm assuming was suppost to be a negative powerup). I'm hoping it's a demo only bug, but it was enought that I wouldn't consider buying the full version. I was eating and playing without any troubles.
Ok, lets assume that this is a bug that is fixed in the full version... how about the rest?
The powerups are different then Arkanoid. You can have multiples, but they only last for a little bit. This was fun. You could get an extended size, magnitized, with rocket paddle all at the same time. You can also change the balls to different types. The best ones are the weird ones. Aliens will come down and blow up a some blocks... Or lightning... Or if you get a 'Z' powerup, it will flip the screen (hard to control).
All in all... if they speed the gameplay up, I think it will be a great game, but until that happens... I would stick with mame and arkanoid.
http://www.sunnygames.com/