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New Breakout games proliferate thick and fast. Last month, we reviewed Krakout from Gremlin and, just in time to miss the final deadline, Arkanoid from Imagine, the officially licensed coin-op conversion, arrived.

Arkanoid is an okay sort of game. It concerns the spacecraft Vaus, the only part of the mothership Arkanoid to survive when the latter was destroyed. Vaus is now trapped in the void by the Dimension Changer and must battle its way through some 32 different levels before facing up to a final confrontation. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?

But it's only when I mention that the Vaus moves left and right along a baseline and penetrates a leve by controlling a ball, sorry energy bolt, to knock out bricks in a wall that the plot becomes clearer.

Of course, there is a bit more to the game than this. Hitting certain bricks releases energy capsules of different types. Catch one of these on your hat and you benefit accordingly. For instance, the ball can be slowed down, or split into three separate units; your bat can expand in length, or become magnetic, so that the ball sticks to it on contact - very useful for aiming at the corners. You can also blast bricks with a laser or open a secret passage onto the next level. Finally, there are extra lives to be gained as well as those awarded for every 20,000 scored. Each of these bonuses lasts until you catch the next capsule. It is a great temptation to go for these capsule regardless, especially the extra lives and level warps. But doing this, if you are anything like me, usually results in you losing both.

The coloured bricks require only a single hit to destroy them but the grey ones may be either completely indestructable or need several hits before they vanish. This causes problems in later levels when there is a whole wall of them and they each require five hits. What is worse, if you lose a life the counters all reset so that you have to start from zero again.

There is also a wide selection of aliens floating about that interfere with your ball but this is only a problem when they are near your bat. The angle that the ball travels depends on whereabouts on the bat you hit it but there it has an annoying habit in the Spectrum version of the game of seeming to pass through the bat when you hit it near the edge.

There is a two player option but this might not be too much fun if you happen to be player one on the C64 version as a bug means that as soon as player two scores 20,000 points he gets an extra life every time he hits a brick!

The big question is should you buy Arkanoid or Krakout! My preference, I am afraid, is for the latter. Sixty-seven more screens plus expansion set to come and a greater range of game, control options give it a decided edge and I found it more playable too.