Breakout and... not much else.

More than ten years ago (jeez I feel really old...), I made a pretty large blog post cataloging some then-interests of mine from what was the time when I entered my final year of high school. Nowadays a lot of those hobbies have either come and gone, or just gone entirely in recent years. Since I only have time to talk about one of these past hobbies of mine, I'll quick go over the others:

• Dot.s has long ended its production line and an attempt to bring the line back doesn't seem likely, especially for those not in the native region of Japan. The last I've done with the product was buy and assemble the larger Super Mario Bros. set for a retro game store as a gift and these days, having already owned several of the sets (including the much rarer "King of Games Legend of Zelda" set now out of print), I stopped collecting more. The Dot.s Design Builder is still available for download from the Mediafire link, as well as this Mega backup. That said good luck finding much about the actual toy line itself thanks to the very generic name they chose for it.
• Kye is still around, sort of. Development on Xye has stopped and my update to my personal level pack bundled with the game is currently on indefinite hold. The newest version of Kye is a web-based version known as Ultimate Kye and some of the alternate versions of the original Windows 3.1 game have been archived following the posting of the original blogpost, including all of the Christmas editions and Dr. Floyd's Kye. These alternative versions can now be found at this unofficial homepage for the series.
• Trainyard no longer works on modern devices and I recall many of the game's online functions regarding the custom level system stopped functioning altogether. With the developer's current focus on other projects I have no say on if they'll return to give Trainyard modern ports anytime soon. If I ever learn programing, I might consider making a PC port or spiritual successor with a very experimental tertiary colors mode (however, that might make an already complex puzzle game even more confusing, hence the experimental comment).
• The Pac-Man fangames are too obscure to really say anything about them, though I did (surprisingly) get Dodger registered from the original author through e-mail back in 2012 or so.

With that out of the way, I'd like to divert your attention to some breakout games that were made for DOS in the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's. And if you've been to this blog before years back, odds are you know which one will be taking part of the spotlight.

That's right, it's Aquanoid, I originally got this game registered in early 2012 roughly six months after getting back into it and made a few extra posts to help others on how to register it. These days, however, both Stefan and Karsten appear to have fallen under radio silence if me having not been able to reach them through e-mail and their website going under is any indication. It only highlights a greater problem with late 80's early 90's shareware games in general: Sure you can play the limited 20-level version of the game, but unless you're really lucky, odds are the original author that would otherwise take your money and send you the full copy is no longer available to contact. Either because they moved and had no address to redirect to, no e-mail set up, no website that still exists or is functional, and/or no modern-day port or digital storefront release later on. With no contacts with the original authors/sellers, owners of the game would be forced to upload and distribute the game preserve it online forever and ensure other people who expressed an interest in buying and playing the full version would actually get the chance to enjoy it, as with what happened with CHAMPrograming's line of arcade ports for DOS.

To make a long story short, Aquanoid, among many other DOS games, is a victim of "Keep Circulating the Tapes", in where a product is essentially considered lost or partially lost because you can't secure a working full version in present times without jumping through a million hoops to dig up old mailing addresses, website archives, and e-mails. I might have gotten lucky with the above-mentioned Dodger as well as the obscure Qix clone Gotcha! since the authors of both games contacted me through e-mail to send me the registered versions after I sent them letters, but with Super Ball!, another DOS Breakout clone, the method didn't work and I simply had my money and letter sent back to me, ensuring that we'll all be stuck with the 5-level unregistered version of Super Ball! for the foreseeable future.

As for the game itself, it still remains a fun time, though it's also challenging and falls victim to not having all its levels designed around its very limited number of angles the ball can travel in, leading to the ball getting stuck without abusing the "Tilt" function to set it free provided it doesn't result in the ball entering another endless loop. The difficulty of the level order is also horribly unbalanced- Many easy levels with very little if any multi-hit or indestructible blocks are scattered into the late-game territory, giving you many opportunities for powerups to just grind for one of the two exit powerups and cheese the level, while on the flipside there are plenty of levels early on that can take a while to complete, either because powerups are scarce or just not available or there's indestructables scattered everywhere, especially in spots that are hard to reach. On the positive side it's one of the few Breakout clones that lets you choose the direction to aim the ball in before serving it (but not while it's active, so no influencing its direction afterwards by hitting it with one end of your paddle), there's good variety of powerups even if most of them are just variants of each other, and in the full version there's five level sets, the default and four extras, plus an editor. Surprisingly, in a feat that doesn't come around too often for a shareware demo, the shareware levels are completely unique to that version and make no appearance in the registered version, which is also the case with our next Breakout clone.

Ladies and gents, meet Electranoid (or "Enoid", as I often see it get called). Like Aquanoid, it was released in an identical  Shareware/Registered format and has completely different levels between the shareware and registered versions. Unlike Aquanoid, the registered version was, for a time, available for free from its now defunct official website under the condition that no other site host it. Compared to the two-man duo that created Aquanoid surviving into the 2010's, Electranoid's Pixel Painters failed to reach the post-Y2K era, making the registered version completely impossible to obtain fully legitimately these days. At least the registered version can still be found online if you know where to look.

Compared to Aquanoid, I didn't have much backstory with Electranoid beyond it being on the same shareware disk I obtained from my grandfather that contained Aquanoid. It also suffers from not working on certain PC builds that could otherwise run DOS games without the aid of emulators, including my Windows 2000, and I needed to get DOSBox up and running in order for it to fully work. The relative rarity of the registered version (despite being available for free at some point from Pixel Painters' website) also meant that the password system would go un-decoded for two and a half decades until very recently when a full password list of the game's 100 levels dropped.

And then there's playing Electranoid itself. While the presentation is great and feels very DOS-like and the difficulty balancing through the levels is more streamlined, Electranoid is, at least in my own opinions, a more difficult game to play optimally and skillfully compared to Aquanoid and you have no difficulty options if you're looking for something a bit easier or more difficult. Most of the game's presentation seems designed specifically to waste your time, whenever it be through the absurdly long (re)spawn times unless you remember to hold the Shift key, or the pool of enemies that make clearing levels more challenging being much more effective at hindering your simple goal of breaking every block in a level compared to most other Breakout clones. In the forefront is the Green Menacer, turning blocks into indestructible metallic green blocks with its green ball, requiring you to swipe a Red Menacer's red ball to get rid of them or have a Bronze or Silver Menacer change it to a multi-hit bronze or silver block so you at least can hit/remove it with your own ball or projectiles. Doing all of these is an exercise in patience and frustration. Why? Not only are the Menacer balls slow as molasses and hard to aim with your paddle, they all self-destruct if they hit another enemy, and sometimes an enemy you need can kill itself on the spot if it launches a ball in an enclosed gap and has no time to float away before its own ball bounces back and destroys it. There's also the "Kaizo Trap", if god forbid you lose your ball after the level's cleared before you have a chance to exit, especially if your paddle is still in the middle of de-equipping either the Laser or Missile powerups.

Electranoid is full of positives and negatives, intentional and not. If I was still doing my full reviews from years back it would easily be a 7.5/10 game. It's got colorful graphics, catchy music, good level design that gradually ramps up in challenge, a very unique set of enemies different from the basic "get in your way" types, and it's good for basic high score runs if you're not committed to reaching the end of the 100-level journey. If you were hoping for some extra features, there's no editor or alternate level sets to give the game stronger replay value. Thankfully the default (and only) levelset is solid enough, and there's no overly cheap level designs, barring the Green Menacer's antics slowing the game down severvely if it decides to get itself going.

While I didn't discover it until months after Aquanoid and Electranoid, 1988's Pop Corn ended up becoming a good favorite of mine. Like Aquanoid, it was made by a two-man group, this time the French duo of Christophe Lacaze and Frederick Raynal. The most notable aspect is the use of CGA graphics, a mere 4 colors total, yet despite that limitation it still manages to make use of them as well as it realistically could. Limitations breed creativity, they always said. It also may be the closest any of these DOS Breakout cones get to mimicking Arkanoid as a whole- but it does it so well and it even comes with a level editor that, unlike Aquanoid's, can make individual level sets that are loaded in by themselves. It's also freeware, ditching the shareware/registered model of the other Breakout clones mentioned above.

The level design in Pop Corn is good and never really gets as evil as the likes of Aquanoid, but like your typical Arkanoid there's the good deal of having to navigate around indestructible blocks and as with Electranoid, none of the powerups available to you can plow through them. There are also teleporter blocks that teleport the ball across the level, parachute blocks that deploy a parachute and make the ball float down slowly, and special "theater" blocks that gradually reveal a short looping animation as you destroy them, said animation also serving as a solid wall. Despite the animations you get out of them being somewhat charming, the theater blocks slow the game down to a glacial pace, especially if you struggle with hitting the two theater blocks wedged in the middle of the pack of six.

Unlike the fate of the other two games above, Pop Corn is still around to some extent, as it was given a modern HTML5 port (as well as versions on mobile) back in 2013. The original 1988 release also includes a separate editor program to make custom level sets in a similar manner to Aquanoid (as well as the DOS port of Arkanoid II: the Revenge of DoH), which sadly doesn't return in the remake and forces you to the original 50-level level set. If you want to play Pop Corn on DOSBox, however, you need to boot up POPSPEEED.exe in the emulator, type POPSPEEED 100, then POPCORN to launch the game into the title screen, then set the cycles count of the emulator to around 300 to keep the speed of all the different elements consistent. It's confusing, and yet it somehow works despite not really being a convenient and user-friendly way to start a game.

I'll admit, my time with breakout clones on DOS only lasted a few years and soon enough the interest fizzled out, though I still pop open Electranoid and Pop-Corn to watch demos of them play out while I work on my projects or artwork. Since then I've discovered many, many other breakout clones, none of which I'd say come close to being the "perfect" breakout clone, marrying the arcade feel of Arkanoid with the sheer volume of features, block types, and flexible editors of modern breakout clones. And while my own Breakout clone, Otaku-Ball, is close to that ideal Breakout experience for me, marrying a heaping tons of features and map gimmicks and having a very flexible editor, I'm considering going back to the drawing board to create a second attempt at "the ultimate breakout" if I can ever get down to learning game development to create something with a more streamlined art and audio direction.

I meant to have this post out in September last year but then I lost interest and forgot about it until rather recentely. After reading this blogpost over before posting, I began to wonder, will I ever get back into a wave of binging and playing retro Breakout games like these again? Honestly I'm not very sure on that.

The 2022 Convention Update: Castle Point Anime Convention 2022

 After months of anticipating the return of conventions, April hit me like a truck, bringing the full force of con season back into my conscious. Castle Point’s 2022 iteration is the first true convention I’ve attended since November 2019, a whopping 29 months prior. Before that, I did go to a smaller-scale local convention on April 2nd known as EMCon and its small scale was a good warmup, even if I personally don’t think it should be called an anime con from how much of it leans more greatly into general pop culture and doesn’t embrace the anime theme as much as these larger anime cons do.

So April came and went, and on April 30th it was time to make the drive down to the Meadowlands Exposition Center to attend the convention’s first day. As the pandemic was still a large concern at that point, vaccinations and masks were required by all attendees inside the building (thank god), but since everything was jam-packed into a very small venue, some parts of it felt rather cramped, especially in the first few hours. The dealer’s room and artist’s alley were tightly packed from the morning and early-afternoon crowds of attendees and it wouldn’t be until the early evening when it felt comfortable enough to walk through without having to dodge everyone. Because of just how ridiculous things could get at this convention in particular, there were lines to get into the dealer’s room and the artist’s alley and people sat at the entrances monitoring the number of people entering and exiting the respective sections, and unlike in 2019, you were allowed to exit from the entry point instead of a dedicated exit.

The artist’s alley was easily the highlight of the convention, as it’s been for most of the cons I go to year-by-year. Being able to meet artists, check out their artwork, and socialize with them about various topics is what drives me to attend CPAC every year, and once the crowds dissipated it was fun to stroll through, as I did several times. The dealer’s room has always been a hard sell for me since I usually don’t come to conventions to buy merchandise and other physical media that I can (usually) just go and buy online. Making matters worse was that while the line for the artist’s alley was rather short and constantly moving until emptied out, the dealer’s room had a constant line for a much, much longer period of time, and it would go from double to even triple the length of the artist’s alley line in the convention’s opening hours. The dealer’s room also didn’t have any big booths of vendors suspending tall stacks of merchandise or posters/wall scrolls to serve as sort-of landmarks or focal points, and this, combined with the outer two isles being significantly shorter than the middle isle, made the dealer’s room a big slog to walk through.

In stark contrast to the dealer’s room and artist’s alley, the gaming area had a very large amount of space to roam. Multiple different console games and a few PC’s lined the left half of the space, offering multiplayer titles (mostly fighting games) like Smash Ultimate (twice!), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kill La Kill If, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Guilty Gear Strive. On the right was the arcade setup and the lineup consisted entirely of, with a few exceptions, Japanese rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, Pop’n Music, Sound Voltex, Project DIVA Arcade, and Taiko no Tatsujin. I didn’t play any of the machines because they had pretty lengthy lines and you can already find most of them at Round 1 arcades all-year-round. In fact, most of the console games that were in the game room fell under this too, whenever they be one of the many modern titles or the rare retro game. Thus, except for a session of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with three others in the final hour of the game room, I pretty much just watched all the action and used the chairs to take a brief break from walking around.

Tucked into the back of the main convention area was the live stage, which housed various vocal musical performances for all to hear. And I really do mean “all”. The volume levels for the speakers on the stage were set so high that you could practically hear the beats even if you were all the way on the opposite end of the convention, and at that distance you couldn’t understand anything besides the thuds of the speakers and the high notes of the singers’ voices. Everything else was inaudible and it made talking and hearing in the convention much more difficult, as I had to raise my voice through a mask to the point that I begun losing my voice, and my inability to step out of the artist’s alley and drink water on the fly only made it worse. I’m convinced if there was a possibility the stage could be moved to a separate building so it wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the convention, it would.

Despite the sounds of the stage blasting through every inch of the convention it was still a good time, spending most of the visit snapping pics of the many cosplays at the event, chatting with artists, buying commissions of my characters, and spectating the games in the game room. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be all colors and rainbows, as one of the attendees would sneak into the artist’s alley and snatch funds from one of the artists, causing bag checks to be temporarily enforced for those entering and leaving the artist’s alley. Second, the convention’s main area has practically no seating options besides the gaming area’s console gaming half and the food court, which can be absolutely painful when you consider that all these conventions opt for floors made of concrete and don’t have anything to accommodate for handicapped attendees or those with leg injuries or problems walking besides the wheelchair ramp. And even if you could get a seat, the chairs were very small and I swear I managed to break one by accident just by sitting on it. I ended up having to lug around a camping chair to sit and take a break, and even then I still ended up with both my legs absolutely wrecked from walking 8,000 steps on pure concrete for 9 hours.

During the endurance through the expo, I took a grand total of 120 different pics of cosplays. As typical of a convention all the “recent big hits” were represented. Lots of Genshin Impact, lots of Demon Slayer, lots (and lots) of My Hero Academia, some Jojo and Persona, and a few surprises and weird picks that nonetheless come off as brilliant. Is it my biggest collection yet? Well, not really. Looking at my statics from past cons, I took more at CPAC’s 2019 event, but more than 2018’s, and as for the highest amount that record still goes to AnimeNEXT 2019. I don’t focus on the photos I do take of cosplays at these events as much as dedicated photographers do, considering I don’t really experiment with different, more dynamic views of the cosplayers or edit them later before posting them.

So what’s next? Well, as you can see from the schedule I posted above, AnimeNEXT got the axe and will not be happening this year. I considered a few alternative conventions that took place around the late May/early June but none of them struck me as intriguing enough to want to attend, especially when I’m still recovering from CPAC 2022 amongst still trying to get back into the swing of drawing art and writing down character bios and game design concepts. That said, my next large event will be Eternal Con 2022 on the first weekend of July, and after that will be Long Island Retro Gaming Expo in August.

As part of the parting words for this post, here’s a link to the gallery of cosplay photos and the art commissions I received by several artists during the event.