As someone who has never played this specific game, is there a campaign or at least a clear end game, or is it simply an infinite game, trying to beat your last score? I am talking only about the single-player mode.

Thanks for mentioning Steam has this free for the weekend. I played each mode including the online "Battle Royale" which was me, one other player, and 23 bots. All that onscreen noise aside, there are other issues as well. My ball cut directly through the path of an enemy (including the "comet trail" it leaves behind) and somehow did not collide with it in the Neo mode. In the Online version, I was on the boss battle and my paddle got stuck in the right-hand corner for 3 or 4 seconds. I had not grabbed a capsule, nor had I been touched by the bosses eye rays, so it wasn't paralyzed as far as I can tell. It just got...stuck. My CPU fan was on full speed by that point though, because there is a LOT going on during the boss fights, to a ridiculous extent. But if this was an issue with too many things going on, I can say this is the first time since buying this laptop (Acer Nitro 5) back in April that I've come up against a game it couldn't run smoothly.

After actually playing, I'd have to adjust my earlier claim that the value is $10-$15...I might pick this up on sale for $5, but it's not worth more than that to me.

The only proper way to play is with a spinner, though I remember playing Arkanoid on the Amiga, where the mouse was a workable substitute. I can't see a way to have gamepad controls without fundamentally changing the gameplay.

Pandora's box has open, come in for a ride.

That's a lot of money for only one mediocre Taito-ish game. Would absolutely pay this for Taito games.

Until I see a ROM extracting script (if at all possible), I'll remain totally uninterested. I don't want to play the old version in a virtual arcade cabinet, I want to make my own for Pete's sake...

Crystal Hammer was fantastic. There was later a Windows version, released by another German company, but with rendered 3D elements and it looked much worse as the original Amiga game. It wasn't colorfull, it was quite drab, especially the backgrounds.

I also remember a shareware game, that my family liked to play: it was called WinBrick 96 (or 97?).

Over the years, I did see many breakout/arkanoid games and clones, like Bricks of Egypt, Shatter, Bananoid, Warkanoid series, Blast Thru (eGames), Blasterball series and many, many others. One cannot count it, how many there are.

The original arcade game and the old ports from the 80s were "campaign only" and had an ending (with a final boss!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn6-zcSxrO4

It was very hard to reach, but it was there. I do not know how the remake handles this option...

Thank you!

Taito's best game series is Darius, by a wide margin.

Rastan was easily my favorite Taito game, of the ones I played, but Rastan II (AKA Nastar Warrior) was bad and Rastan III was Japan-only, and from what I can tell looks like a brawler rather than a platformer anyway. So as a series it was not so good.