Tournament Arkanoid for NES: a history

Happy New Year everyone. Usually I would begin the year with some kind of big update post and a look through some goals that I have in store. This year, however, I didn't really have much to comment on that I didn't already mention earlier in the year. It's too early in the year to really put together the convention schedule and this year I had promised myself internally that I would focus on more than just conventions; and that goes double for my current work force and this very blog.  In addition, there are quite a number of leftover projects from prior years that I wanted to finally get done so I could give them full releases online and move onto other, bigger projects.

Approximately eleven-twelve years ago across the years 2013 and 2014, I would discover Arkalavista, an editor for creating modifications (or "fan games") of the NES version of Arkanoid. Having a Macintosh at my disposal, I was able to download and use the editor to create a plethora of Arkanoid hacks which would later get published onto ROMhacking.net thanks to the help of MrRichard999. The two most notable mods I produced during this run of custom Arkanoid mods were Advanced Edition, Chinese Arkanoid, and Amiga Alternative Levels. I was even able to suggest improvements to Arkalavista to make it more user friendly, making the process of creating and testing these mods more seamless. However, fans of the arcade version of Arkanoid may notice a strange, curious omission from the lineup: the official upgrade known as Tournament Arkanoid.

Last year in late Janruary, during a rather gloomy week and after finding Arkalavista in the folders on my Macintosh, I decided to create a theoretical NES port of Tournament Arkanoid, converting all 32 levels to the NES with compromises to fit the reduced size of the playfield and some of the improved color choices for blocks from the Amiga alternative levels conversion. The hack would sit incomplete for some time as I focused on other things until last week when I finally decided to finish the hack and publish it, adding in three new levels to fill in the final leg of the game before facing DOH and adjusting powerup placements.

With ROMhacking.net no longer accepting new submissions (and myself having having had some trouble trying to submit my Jr. Pac-Man 7800 hack Bleach Pac-Man in the past), I have decided to post the hack here in the meantime as "Release 1". The only elements that I have a desire to change but couldn't due to my lack of hex editing knowledge would be remaking the title screen to better match the arcade version (its background is in the ROM but goes unused) and a few other miscellaneous palette edits that aren't supported by Arkalavista. If a 100% complete mod of the game with the aforementioned changes becomes possible, I will consider publishing this Tournament Arkanoid mod on one of the alternate ROM hack-hosting sites that have spawned in the wake of ROMhacking.net's closure.

Download Torunament Arkanoid for NES (Release 1) here.

You will need a patching utility to apply it to an existing Arkanoid ROM.