Space Invaders was one of the first games released by Taito Corporation, the company we now know for a wide variety of classic shooters like the Darius series along with the Arkanoid and Cooking Mama games. It's inspired a variety of sequels and remakes, most recently the excellent Space Invaders: Infinity Gene for PlayStation Network, XBLA and IOS. It's representative of video games as a whole - pretty much everyone knows it and has played it regardless of if they do a lot of gaming or not.
What is there to add to this game, really? Perhaps even moreso than Pong, Space Invaders is the video game. Volumes have been wrote about it and what it did for gaming. We wouldn't have games as they are today without it. But chances are you know that. All I can do at this point is play it!
"See these guys? Shoot them." Doesn't get more straightforward than that. The colors in this game are unusual - nearly everything toward the bottom of the screen is green, while nearly everything toward the top is white with the sole exception of the UFO if you manage to destroy it and explosions from your own missed shots.
You're the little green turret down there at the bottom. You're armed with a peashooter that can fire one tiny missile at a time. Missing sucks since you have to wait for your shot to vanish before you can fire again, so try to avoid that. The bunkers down there with you are basically destructible cover. A common strategy is to get underneath one and fire up through it. It's not a perfect defense but it's better than being out in the open. And naturally, it almost goes without saying that this is before the era of life bars or shields - one shot and you're done. Since the Invaders become faster and more aggressive as they proceed on their march toward the bottom of the screen you'll want to take them out quickly before you're overwhelmed.
That red UFO is worth loads of points if you manage to shoot it before it floats off the screen - at least as many as a couple normal Invaders, usually more than that. You have to decide if you can spare a couple seconds to take a shot at it when it pops up. There's ways to predicting when it will arrive, but frankly I haven't delved far enough into hardcore Space Invaders strategy to tell you about it. I know, truly a loss.
And that's it! When you kill all the Invaders another set appears and this continues until you run out of lives. There's no epic ending here - like many older games you're going to lose and the only question is when. In a way that's one of the biggest differences between modern games and the games of yore - today it's almost inevitable that you'll finish any given game, but back in the day you literally couldn't. You also had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to an arcade. Truly those were better times. Truly.
No comments:
Post a Comment