A long, long time ago, beyond the sea and in the Ju.eS.Ej (USA) a small company "Atari" was established. The company started to be famous (only) thanks to the game PONG. This game, though with very simple rules and structure, felled their possibilities generation of the seventies. The rule was simple: on the screen we could see two bats and one ball which you had to control by rebounding it from one paddle to the other. Companies that wanted to snitch the idea of the game PONG, had to take claim of copyright infringement to code, appearance and the whole structure of the game into account. And that was the point why Breakout was published in the late 70's and Arkanoid few years later. So I have to stress that the great work of TimSoft, about which I am writing below, is based on these two games.

Manganoid is another cover or clone of mentioned games – Breakout and Arkanoid. This arcade (puzzle) game was established by TimSoft and published (revealed) in 1997 on C-64 and it didn't differ from its prototypes. Also here we have to destroy blocks on the screen. The difference is one, here we have two bats and we have to control it separately by moving your joystick up and down or sideways.

Steering two bats in the same time seems to be hard but I know a lot of different games, in which steering was unsupportable. Bartosz Apanasewicz (coder) has made this game smooth and each subsequent level of the game is really harder than previous (It took me 15 minutes to destroy the final block in one level but finally I made it). Apart from interesting game, it offers us a lot of bonuses after completing the next level, for example erotic background that is made of manga. By destroying subsequent blocks we can see some of our erotic background. The background is different in each level, so we have a lot of good stuff to watch and enjoy. ;)

Summing up, this game stand out from the other clones of Arkanoid or Breakout, because of its colorful graphic, rich in backgrounds and level of difficult. So if you are lonely maniac of C-64 and you don't have a person you can hug during winter or autumnal evenings, this title is made for YOU. :D

Ryan

Translated by Agata Gizka.