Giveaway of the Day - Fairy Arkanoid

The game is a 10.5Mb download which expands to 12.3Mb when installed. The zip file unpacks to 3 files, a read me, the set up file and an activation module. Follow the read me instructions to the letter otherwise the game may not activate. That is you must activate the game before installing it onto your computer. Make sure you check the boxes during installation that ask if you want a desktop shortcut and a start menu folder, which contains both a game shortcut and an uninstaller (as well as a link to the developers site).

Introduction:

The following is the introduction to the game that you’ll find on Gambana’s web site. You can go directly to their site by clicking on the reference I’ve added below the introduction.

Fairies are captured by evil dwarfs! Destroy dungeon blocks and free fairies! Use your skills collecting golden coins, magical jewels and extra life potion bottles. Fairys’ blessings and dwarfs’ curses will accompany you. May luck be your friend!

Reference accessed 5th Jan 10 http://www.gambana.com/downloads/arcade_and_action/fairy_arkanoid.html

The Game:

Arkanoids are one of my favourite arcade genres so it’s likely I’m going to be a little biased with my review, but I’ll try to be as objective as I can.

Fairy Arkanoid is an average game (trying to be objective, ) in my opinion, but there are some nice little touches to the it that make it a worthwhile download. The graphics should appeal to the children, though the older boys may find references to fairies a little too much and would probably never admit to their friends that they played it. To the rest of us, male and female, despite the cartoon orientated graphics, I think it looks professionally rendered, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing the hour long demo last night. The game is relatively easy. Well for someone who used to play arkanoids every day it is. There’s an excellent number of power ups including the usual bat ball expanders, ball seed adjusters, guns etc, plus some more unusual ones such as ones that add more bricks to the arena if you collect one of them. There’s one that enables the last block to be auto destroyed via an homing missile, though it’s more like semi automatic because you have to activate it by clicking your left mouse button.

There are also some mini games included. The two I encountered while playing the demo included a connect 4 style game and one where you have to destroy some vases using a moving arrow, (see images) The first of these appeared when I’d completed the first stage called Misleading Canyon. There are nine stages in all with names like derelict coal mine, perilous ravines and diamond mines, however when I checked out the configuration files it indicated that the mini games were dependent upon collecting five of the jewels during one level play; these are occasionally dropped by a dwarf that walks across the top of the playing area every level. He drops a variety of things from jewels, gold coins and coal, the latter 2 are positive, which add points to the score and the coal is negative, and takes away a specific amount of points.

There are awards made for attaining specific things such as playing the game for one hour straight without a break, winning three moni games, losing no balls for a specific number of rounds, the first one is for three rounds and for winning a specific number of levels. (See the game editing section for more details)

There are a variety of bricks from some that take several hits to destroy to ones that’s explode destroying the surrounding bricks. Some levels have teleporter bricks that move the ball from one part of the playing arena to the other. Yet other bricks leave small bottles of elixir that when collected in sufficient numbers can earn extra lives. You can also earn extra lives by winning the mini games that are played throughout the game. I found the ball physics to be reasonable. Allowing the ball to hit the bat in different positions causes the ball to ricochet off at lots of different angles. With practice you can control the ball quite well.

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Editing the Game:

To edit the configuration files you need an XML text editor such a sApt edit (a previous giveaway)There are four configuration files which can be found in the config folder within the main games folder. It looks like you may be able to change loads of parameters to give yourself higher scores for example if you change the number 25 in the following config line you should be able to gain a higher or lower score.

25

Not that changing the score is going to make much of a difference; but it may be possible to change the number of items you need to collect to earn a new life. I haven’t had the time to check this out yet, but will be doing later today. I’ll let you know what happened. A more meaningful change may be the awards. For example you gain an award for saving 5 fairies, which is basically completing 5 levels. You could raise or lower this number. The next award for saving fairies doesn’t happen until you’ve saved 50, then the final ‘Gold’ award occurs near the end of the game when you’ve saved 95 fairies. (only five away from the end of the game. You can change the number of balls you start with useful if you aren’t too good with arkanoids, the number of elixirs given in any level. (collecting a specific number of these will give you an extra life. You can even increase or decrease the number of bonuses to make it easier or harder. Finally it may even be possible to edit each level to make it different ( a great way to extend the life of the game once you’ve played all the levels. There’s more, but I’ll let you discover those for yourself (if you are interested in messing around wit the game. I would create backups of the originals before you start to edit them, just in case you do create a problem.

Images:

You can see nearly 60 screen captures of game menus, in game screens, mini games and power up lists etc

http://s571.photobucket.com/albums/ss160/Whiterabbit04/Fairy%20Arkanoid/?albumview=slideshow

If you want to check them all out on one page you can click on the grid button to the bottom right just above the thumbnail photo strip. There’s a slider that will increase the size of the images if they are too small to see properly.

Music:

There’s no way of changing the music unless you now how to edit the main game file and add the music to the coding.

The music is fairly basic, but I found I was moving my head and shoulders to the rhythm despite it hurting my back a little. I quite liked it, though it’s nothing special.

System Requirements:

O.S……………………..Windows 98/98SE/2000/Me/XP/Vista
Processor……………….1.6Gh
System RAM…………..1024Mb
Free hard drive space….100 MB

Conclusion:

I’ve been playing arkanoid/breakout games ever since the first one was released by Taito onto an arcade console back in the 1970’s, and for the past several years have been collecting them almost like collecting coins or stamps, and until recently I played one or more arkanoid/breakout games almost every day; so found Fairy Arkanoid a little too easy and was able to play through the game losing only a few balls (and that was because I was busy taking screen captures). That said I still really enjoyed playing the game and will definitely be adding this to the hundreds of arkanoids I already own.

Unfortunately I felt the level layouts were not very inspiring and I think there could have been more variety with respect to brick colours, with that in mind there is the possibility of some adjustments through the configuration files so those who find it too easy may be able to make the game more challenging to play, conversely you could also make it easier to play.

As far as scoring goes I’d give it 7 out of 10 for playability, 7 out of 10 for overall graphics (despite what I said above) and 6 out of 10 for re-playability.

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Alternatives:

You’ll find loads of good freeware arkanoid and breakout alternatives in the forums via the arkanoids thread and the free games synopsis. I’ve not updated the arkanoid thread for quite some time, so you may find some different ones in the synopsis. You can also find 12 pages of arkanoids, with 15 to a page over at Caiman’s free games web site.

From the links below I recommend Poing, Jardinains, DX Ball, Beatball, Hoowaball, Chak’s Temple, Jarkanoid 2 & 3, Purebreaker 3, Powball, Takamaru, Kuruku, A-ball and most of the other breakouts from Gametop, you’ll probably recognise from previous game giveaways if you’ve been visiting the site since it’s inception; for example A-Ball, whose original name is Nuclear Ball and Geometry Ball, which is Twinzoid. There’s also a couple more that we’ve been given previously such as Egyptoball, Egyptian Ball and Aztec Bricks. All the Gametop games are usually commercial games that are still being sold by many game distributors, but Gametop pay them a retainer to be able to give the games away. As with all Gametop games, your browser opens when you shut the game down, but this is ‘innocuous’. Some of the games will be configured to install toolbars and change your home page if you don’t uncheck the check boxes during the installation wizard, so be sure to watch every step of the installation procedure.

Finally the Czech site below has 15 pages of Arkanoids with 12 per page; there are a lot of freeware ones, with some commercial ones.

Arkanoid thread:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2607

Synopsis:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/4534

Caimans:

http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/fbreakout.html

Gametop Games:

http://gametop.com/category/breakout.html

Freegame.cz:

http://www.freegame.cz/rub.php?idr=5&ids=11&st=0

Finally, there’s a 3D breakout called Ballistik free over at Sandlot Games until Monday; you do have to create a free account to be able to get the free game. They give away a different free game every week:

http://www.sandlotgames.com/w5/ballistik.html

p.s.

The severs of the image hosting site I use somtimes drop out. hopefully the images I posted will re-appears sometime today. I prefer using the site becasue there are no bandwidth limits compared to free accounts with hosting sites like photobucket. I used to have to set up a new account every week and even then if the game was popular, the bandwidth would be exceeded before the day was out. If you want to see plenty of images, I’ve posted nearly 60 screencaptures via the link aboce (in the image section)

Impossibile proseguire al livello 45, si arriva si distruggono tutti i blocchi e la farfalla non si sblocca.
Come si fa a proseguire??

…………………….Moderator Comment………………………

Translated using Google translator:

Can not continue to level 45, you get all the blocks are destroyed and the Butterfly No change.
How do you go?

Hopefully someone will be able to confirm whether this is a glitch or just a local problem. We’ve already had two other arkanoids that froze part way through completing the levels, so this will be a big disappointment if it is a bug.

If there is no resolution you could check out one of the many arkanoids I’ve linked to. there are some nuch better ones than this (IMO) Alternatively, you could try editing the configuration values using an appropriate editor

Edit:

The game plays past level 45. I’ve just completed level 48 with no problems or glitches.