Not just any old Arkanoid mind. I redis­covered the best version of them all: Megaball.

Way back in the day I got my very first computer. It was an Amiga A500Plus — and it was loaded! It had 2mb RAM, the ECS chipset, AmigaOS 2.1 and (get this) a 20mb SCSI hard drive. I even got a CD-ROM drive for it. Along with some random old dot matrix printer I had for it and a copy of Wordworth I could do all of my homework on it. Deluxe Paint 3, Brilliance 2.0 and Imagine let me paint and animate all sorts of crap. But that wasn’t what it was used for 95% of the time.

Oh no. You see once upon a time, I bought myself a copy of Amiga User International magazine. And on the cover­disc was an absolutely brilliant little game: Megaball by Al and Ed Mackey.

I must have devoted whole weeks of my life destroy­ing my own high scores. It was absolutely addict­ive. My mother was partial to the odd go on it too — and the only game that had inter­ested her at all before then was the classic Digger.

Fast forward to this evening, and I was feeling a bit nostal­gic. I’d been reading some forums and came across a post saying that games these days don’t really push the hardware the way they did in the old days. After putting them to rights (Half Life 2? Not pushing the hardware? Ha!) I found myself looking back at all the old games I used to love. So I went search­ing for Megaball.

Well I never. Al Mackey has got a website, and you’ll never guess whats on there? Megaball 4! Yay! Woo! Houpla! Only one problem: I haven’t got an Amiga anymore, and I haven’t yet got around to installing WinUAE on this machine. Back to Google we go then…

Hooray!

What do I find next? A Windows tribute to the mighty MegaBall — DXBall. Its brilliant — not quite as good as the original, but still very playable and really really addict­ive. I seem to have been playing it for hours now. In fact, I’m going to pop back in for one last game…