Arkanoid tries to give some legitimacy to it's existence by having an actual plot. You the player control a paddle known as the "Vaus", and your task is to break all the bricks at the top of the screen (just like Super Breakout). Except it's been enhanced quite a bit by a series of "pills" that fall from the bricks you break that can give special enhancements to the Vaus - like the ability to fire at bricks, make the Vaus longer, make the ball stick to the Vaus, or multiply the number of balls on screen to three. It also deviates from the original formula in that the brick configurations are not always just a wall of bricks, some of them are built into designs and artwork, and patterns, to make things more interesting. Also, there are little aliens that come from the ceiling - DOH I think? And you kill them by hitting them with the ball.

Let's talk about interfaces in video games a bit. The original ball and paddle games - ie PONG, Breakout, etc. - the beginning of the genre that lead to Arkanoid, all were played by a knob on either a potentiometer or a encoder, which allowed the paddle to be smoothly moved back and fourth in a very intuitive, analog fashion.

Then the NES came along, and PC's started in on the action....

The NES did away with having as many attachments as a vacuum cleaner in favor o 2 gamepads and a zapper for almost everything. PC's, while they had all these controllers, most were analog joysticks for flight sims, anything else was done using the keyboard arrow keys.

These interfaces SUCK for ball-n-paddle games (for hte most part, arrow keys and gamepads do alright, just not as good as good-ole-paddles). I used to never play Arkanoid for the Tandy 1000, but I wanted to have more games that worked with my Tandy's 320x200 and 160p 16-color graphics modes to showcase the computer's awesome hardware. This was during the pandemic, and right at that time I just happened upon a good deal on a vintage Tandy Deluxe Mouse on e-bay.

The Tandy Deluxe Mouse was a 2 button mouse designed for the Tandy TRS-80 gameport (such as those on the Color Computer, or "CoCo" for short"). The CoCo's ports were lifted for the Tandy 1000 series computers, and thusly, with a DOS driver - JOY.SYS - it can use the mouse. As implied, the mouse works like an Analog Joystic where the pots are turned by a heavy steel ball, not by a lever/fulcrum system.

Turns out, that controller is AWESOME for playing Arkanoid I and II on the Tandy 1000.