Ark: The Magic Blackboard [by Alpha 72]

Game Review: The Magic Blackboard
Release Date: June 2005
Developer: Alpha 72
Genre: Breakout
System Requirements: Windows 95/NT/98/Me/2000/XP, Pentium II 400 MHz, 128 RAM, 32 3D graphics card -32 MB RAM, Direct X 8.0+
Players: 1
Price: $14.95


Alpha72 Games has offered their addition to the Arkanoid ranks with an unusual looking game called The Magic Blackboard.

The game offers a classic arcade mode and a puzzle game mode. The former is a blend of classic Arkanoid (use a paddle and a ball to destroy bricks) and other games such as the famous Pang, where you have to split bubbles in half. It also bears some resemblance to Space Invaders because in some levels the blocks slowly drift towards you and cause you to lose a life when they reach the bottom of the screen. There are over a hundred arcade levels bundled up into small episodes with bonus levels in between. Players can choose which levels to clear first, but they’ll have to finish them all eventually to advance to the next episode.

The puzzle mode requires you to clear the playing area by strategically changing the colors of some bricks in a level to create groups of three or more, then when you hit them again they disappear in a series of bright flashes. The challenge here is to keep your bricks connected to suitable groups of others at all times, because single “floaters” cannot be dissolved. The initial puzzle levels are remarkably easy to solve, but the last 30 or so levels are surprisingly difficult and require you to carefully plan and measure every move ahead of time.

The way The Magic Blackboard presents itself on the screen is very uncommon – there is only one graphics mode, 640x480, and a “gooey” filter makes everything shine with a somewhat ethereal glow. This is certainly something one needs to get used to, and quite a few people who saw this game on my computer thought that something was wrong with the monitor. The colorful graphics and child-friendly motifs almost seem to target the elementary school audience. Everything is friendly, colourful, and very blurry.

When playing, one may find the general difficulty to be fairly high, and the countless, barely distinguishable power ups to be confusing. This conflicts with the “elementary school” appearance of the menus, game art, and texts. Simply put, The Magic Blackboard optically appeals to children, but the game play is too challenging for them.

Graphics: -
The graphics are very colourful and intentionally blurry and everything smears and ghosts as it moves. The Magic Blackboard could have looked a lot better, and supporting only one resolution of 640x480 pixels is not appropriate for a DirectX 8.0 game, period. The sprites are very simple, but the blurriness makes it difficult to tell important ones (i.e. the power ups) apart.

Sound: +
The sound effects are something to get used to, I guess, but to be honest, I liked them. Whenever the ball hits an object in the game, a single note of a mysterious melody is played, and as each level progresses, the sounds become more and more melodic. Some levels have actual background music in addition to the melody effects.

Game Play: +
Five words: Not enough time to react. Because of the low resolution and large sprites, the ball’s travel times are very short – too short for beginning or young players. Especially in later stages of the game, when the bricks move towards the paddle menacingly pixel by pixel, the action gets very hectic and important details disappear in the game’s motion blur filter. The bottom line is that you have a game that requires too much luck to succeed.

On the other hand, the puzzle mode is fairly innovative. It’s fun to solve a couple dozen levels, but eventually, young players may find themselves stumped by the sheer complexity of The Magic Blackboard. They need to remember many different types of bricks and their individual behavior, and then properly predict what will happen before they make their move. This is where an undo function would be helpful. And since you have to hit stuff with your ball using nothing but the paddle, the puzzle mode requires considerable motor skills. Also, some of the late levels are astonishingly easy, as if the level designers got a bit bored.

Value: +
The Magic Blackboard is a fairly priced game, but the levels don’t offer enormous variety (especially since it’s a clone of a game well over 20 years old) to entertain for more than a few levels at a time. There is no level editor, and the novelty features like bubbles and vector bricks don’t make up for the game’s shortcomings.

Concept: -
The game simply doesn’t work for me. At the beginning, there are a few pleasant surprises, such as having to write your player name with the mouse instead of the keyboard for the high score table. But something always seems to be amiss – as if the game was intended to be something grand, making consistent use of the “blackboard” features beyond tracking a player’s name. As it is, The Magic Blackboard merely appears to be a very blurry Arkanoid variant with a puzzle mode.

Fun: -
This would be a fairly decent BreakOut / Arkanoid spin-off if the game rewarded skill more than luck (especially in the later stages), and if the blur effect wasn’t as obnoxiously overdone (turning it off isn’t an alternative). As it is though, the game fails to entertain for long periods of time, and is frustrating for younger players, whom I would consider the target audience. A little more research and a little more sophistication regarding level design would have worked miracles for The Magic Blackboard.

Recommendation: Try
After some initial moments of glee, The Magic Blackboard loses its appeal and turns into a boring exercise for adult or adolescent players and those attracted to the challenge of beating the high score may be deterred by the unconventional graphics. For children, the game may retain some of its attractiveness, but the lack of tangible goals – destroying blurry bricks in space is a very abstract game concept for elementary school kids – makes the game less than optimally suited for this age group.

Added: October 15th 2005
Reviewer: Moritz Voss
Score:
Hits: 1670
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