Bananoid

The Good
Bananoid is not a really good game. What IS good about it though, is the great programming technique of Bill Reider. The game runs completely smoothly on just about any old hardware (used to work fine on my 486 with Trident 8900C/D), and utilizes a very rarely used tweaked mode of 360x240, which works quite well. I also like the idea of two parts of the screen side by side, by admittedly the implementation is quite horrible. Still, the ingame graphics are fairly good and the animation is smooth.

The Bad
Gameplay-wise Bananoid sucks. It's simply not fun. I can appreciate good programming as much (even more) as the next guy, but still - the game really is horrible to play. The mouse controls are erratic at best and the angle calculation doesn't make any sense what-so-ever. And to top it all, terrible, almost none-existing sound effects add a great deal to the frustration of a player.

The Bottom Line
In short - a wonderfully programmed but terrible game.

The Good
William Reider liked to push graphics hardware, and it shows in some of his earlier arcade-to-pc conversions like Operation Wolf, which supported a VGA-like color palette on certain EGA cards that permitted register tweaking. Bananoid is no exception; Bill had figured out, along with many other VGA tinkerers at the time, that you could unchain VGA video memory and access it in a planar fashion, leading to multiple video pages and oversize video pages (or both at the same time).

Bananoid is, as stated in the readme file that comes with it, a technology demo. Bill wanted to see what unchained VGA could do, and he released his efforts. Based on that, the graphics are a great first effort, both in terms of appearance and speed.

The Bad
Bananoid is just a technology demo. So, as you can guess, gameplay is a bit lacking. Ball reflection angles are fixed at 45 degree angles, so you can play the same screen for 15 minutes trying to hit that one last block. And it's only 7 levels, which is short.

The Bottom Line
As a demo, its great. As a game, it stinks. Pretty cut and dry, I'd say! :-)