U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Although I like to joke that I don’t do research for my reviews, that’s largely a joke. Going back and doing deep dives on subjects can feel tedious, yes, but sometimes it has to be done. In looking up games for Taito’s Arkanoid series, I’ve found a number of weird things about the games that most reports don’t tend to mention. More wikis out there, for instance, state that Arkanoid Returns only has 50 stages even though the game has 100 built in (and you need to use a code on the arcade cabinet, or play the PlayStation version, to play all 100). Wikipedia doesn’t consider Arkanoid R 2000 to be a different game, even though it has a whole new set of stages in it, while considering Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh to be a new game, even though it’s just an arcade expansion pack for the original title. No two sources seem to agree on the full list of what qualifies as a game in the series, or even what features are in each game.

Discrepancies like this annoy me. I don’t know if you might have heard but, apparently, not everything you read online is correct.

In doing my research I then came across a title that seems to have fallen through the cracks: Tournament Arkanoid. Like Revenge of Doh, Tournament Arkanoid was an upgrade board for the original title, swapping out its 32 stages for a new set of boards. This was so arcade owners could get more life, and more quarters, out of their aging machine. New stages meant returning players, and it allowed the game to live on for a time, at least in American arcades. This was a version of the game exclusive to the West, never leaving North American shores or even seeing a port to home consoles. It’s a small, little known variant that was still an official Taito product. But now we get to see it to decide if it was worth tracking it down.

Developed by Taito and published by Romstar, Tournament Arkanoid is Arkanoid, only harder. Unlike Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh, there are no changes to the basic gameplay. There are no new power-ups, nor are there any changes to the basics of the bricks themselves. That means you’ll have the same basic power-ups from the original game (Extend, Laser, Duplication, Player, Slowdown, and Breakthrough) along with the same basic bricks (standard, multi-hit silver, and unbreakable gold). If you’ve played Arkanoid then you’ll absolutely know the basics of Tournament Arkanoid.

The major change for this version of the game is that all 32 boards (not counting the 33rd board with the fight against Doh) have been remade. That means 32 new challenges to tackle, all to lure in players that had seen every board of the original game and wanted new challenges to tackle. And they are challenging, as this was a game designed to be tough. It wanted to earn that Tournament moniker, giving players something to really sink their teeth (and quarters) into after they’d become too skilled at the original game.

By the mid game players will find that most of the stages are designed to be painful. Most layouts come in one of two varieties: either they’re largely comprised of gold bricks with just a handful or normal bricks to kill, or they’re layouts of standard bricks wrapped in a layout of silver bricks (which, by the mid game, take three hits to destroy, and four by the end game). Hell, a few of the layouts consist of a single gap for the ball to fit through surrounded by gold bricks, basically making it luck, and not skill, to get the ball where it’s supposed to go. It will take fast reflexes to be able to keep up with the ball as it’s bouncing all around, speeding up as it hits gold bricks without doing anything over and over.

These layouts are rough. I would argue about whether it’s a fun kind of rough, though. Revenge of Doh had devious layouts, ones that would challenge the player, but they were also creative and interesting. While you could spend time on a stage trying to find the right gap to get into areas it never felt dull. Tournament Arkanoid, though, does feel dull at times. Watching the ball bounce around fruitlessly for stage after stage leads to a kind of boredom even while you’re having to fly the Vaus quickly around to keep the ball alive. It wears on you, grinding you down.

And it doesn’t feel fair. The stages take so long to get into, with so many of them requiring a solid minute before progress can really be made, and it’s pretty clear the goal isn’t to provide a fun experience but just to beat you and steal a life (or two, or more). While hard stages are in every Arkanoid game, these are a step above that. Clearly Taito wanted to make something truly challenging, but their idea of challenge was just to pack everything to make the player lose. That’s different from solid, devious levels. Very different.

In a way this feels like a rough draft for while would come in Revenge of Doh. Instead of adding in new features and building new challenges around them, Taito took the base game and tried to see what they could do just with the same programming. It’s a cheap reconstruction of the game just to shove something out, and if it were any other company making it than Taito themselves I’d almost chalk it up to a work-for-hire situation. Hell, it might still have been, with Romstar perhaps pushing for the new game and Taito just shitting out whatever they could to get a quick buck. That’s how Tournament Arkanoid feels: like a cheap hack from the original source.

As for the name, well it’s hard to know if this machine was even meant for use in tournaments. While you would assume that’s the case, with “Tournament” right in the name, I can’t find any evidence that Arkanoid tournaments were ever held, let alone that this edition was put into those events. Perhaps there were local tourneys and Romstar had this game commissioned for those events. Tracking down that kind of info is hard online, especially when putting “Arkanoid tournament” into a search just turns up hits for Tournament Arkanoid. I would love to know what the originals of this game really were (since no one really reports on this game at all except to say, “yep, it exists.” If there were tournaments, and this game was included, I’d love to know how it went over with the hardcore players.

In my head the scene plays out like the climax of The Wizard. Three of the top players in the tournament are brought up onto a curtained riser and the announcer goes, “you think you’re the best of the best with your Vaus? Well, get a load of this!” And then the curtain drops and there’s sounds of hushed shock and confusion as three Tournament Arkanoid machines are revealed. Then they have to compete on these machines, not knowing what the game is like or how the levels are going to work. And then one of them wins and is taken up by an alien to fight Doh for real in a battle in outer space.

Okay, that last bit is from The Last Starfighter, but you get my point. That would have been a killer move at a tournament… and I doubt it ever happened.

For the hardcore pros maybe this game had some appeal since it was a new version of the game, at least insofar as it had different levels to play. With that said, the levels aren’t interesting, just hard, and I doubt most casual players would have enjoyed throwing themselves against the machine for very long. It has a very narrow, very specific appeal and, outside of that, the game just couldn’t stand up. Which is likely why it’s fallen through the cracks among fans and players. This is a weird variant, but not a one way, and considering it came out the same year as Revenge of Doh, it’s pretty clear which sequel players were going to care about more.