Heck, even the passable first-generation Break 'em All beats the pants off Taito's offering. Without the paddle the game is a barely mediocre touch-screen controlled Breakout copycat, and in this "Breakout copycat" category there's plenty of better competition: Nervous Brickdown comes to mind first. Without it, you're missing the one element that would have made the game slightly worthwhile. Support is still in the game, but Square Enix clearly doesn't want to front the expense of such a focused peripheral. The version Square Enix has released in the US is just a localized version of the Japanese version, but with the all-important Paddle Controller removed from the equation. These two elements combined make Arkanoid DS an absolute joke as a challenging game. To make things worse, if you let a ball drop past your paddle, it stays in play thanks to a forcefield at the bottom your "lives" are counted by how many times you bounce the ball off this electric field. Your default game paddle size is a good 25% of the width of the entire arena, which makes it extremely difficult to fail in Arkanoid. Action takes place within walls that extend inwards from the edge of the screen so much that you lose valuable gameplay real estate. But the real kicker is the insistence of a bordered game screen. It's something you can adjust for, but it really screws with your timing when anticipating an incoming ball dropping down from the top display. It's done incorrectly: the designers put too much dead space between the two screens, so the balls vanish into the void for slightly too long when traveling from one screen to the other. On the DS, the designers went with the "use the two screens as one display" route, which – if done incorrectly – is just asking for problems. The sound effects and power-ups may have matched the arcade game but the same action is nowhere near the original. But the gameplay is so far away from the original Arkanoid. The Paddle peripheral is absolutely fantastic: the knob has great weight and interfaces with the system and game extremely well. But once you played the game it's easy to see just how bad of an "Arkanoid" game it is.
It was very exciting to see that Taito was, potentially, taking the Nintendo DS game seriously if they were actually taking the time to create a peripheral for it. Arkanoid DS released in Japan with the Paddle Controller, a spinner peripheral that mimicked the original arcade game's weighted knob for controlling the left and right motion of your on-screen paddle.
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