One of the earliest video games I ever played was Breakout on the old Atari VCS. The concept was simple: you had a bat at the bottom of the screen and had to hit a ball repeatedly against a wall until all the individual bricks had been smashed. It was simple, but good fun it its day. Around ten years on, arcade company Taito developed the genre with the Breakout-inspired game, Arkanoid. You still had to bash bricks with a ball, but you could also collect icons which would give you extra powers (such lasers on your bat, a longer bat) to help (or in some cases, hinder) completion of the levels. These simple refinements made for an addictive game that spawned ...  Read the complete review