Free Love

Fellow Slashdot Author and geek Emmett Plant stopped by the Geek Compound and therefore warranted another episode. We talk about Red Hat teaming with Real Networks, the new offerings from Palm Computing, and more.

Comments

3D Arkanoid?

[David Gould]

With all that talk about Arkanoid toward the end there, I have to ask: has anyone else seen a 3D version? I got a crippled (limited to first four levels) version of a Mac game called (I think) "Diamonds 3D" in the shareware bundle that came on a hard drive I bought a while ago. It's basically an expansion of the Arkanoid concept to three dimensions, and it's good enough that I'll probably buy the full version if I ever get around to it.

The three-dimensionalization is done in basically the same way as the various 3D Tetrises that I've seen (3Tris, Block-Out, etc.): you are looking straight down (or forward, or up, if you prefer, but "Remember, the enemy gate is always down.") into a rectangular space, with bricks in various formations that you need to break by hitting them with the ball. At the top is your (conveniently transparent) paddle, which tracks your mouse. You drop the ball down, it bounces around, hits bricks, and comes back up at you, and you need to hit it. The ball's speed and angle are controlled by how fast the paddle is moving when you hit it, and if you were moving too fast, it becomes a blur that you have no hope of catching the next time. When you miss it, it escapes with a sort of neat broken-glass effect, apparently meant to indicate that it shot through your screen. There are various special things, e.g, special diamond bricks that can only be broken after all the normal ones are gone, and different color bricks that can only be broken after you've hit a switch to turn your ball the same color.

By the way, wasn't it a bit weird to describe Arkanoid (as if anyone worthy of reading Slashdot, let alone listening to GiS, would not remember it) with "It's like 'Breakout'."? I remember Breakout as one of the audio-tape-loaded games on the 16K Commodore Pet that used those weird PETSCII graphics and had no physics whatsoever, so the ball would only move at 45-degree angles and could only hit odd- or even-numbered bricks on the respective parity lives. It just seems that that is a bit more obscure than Arkanoid, and therefore doesn't help much as an explanation. Or is "Breakout" also the name of some more recent and/or popular game that I should know of?


David Gould