The game I played most this week: Invaders

Shoot and Destroy: Invaders

From Game Zone Project comes yet another Space Invaders clone. According to the version history, the game dates back to late 2004, and it looks like the original release was titled "Space Invaders." The release I have is simply called "Invaders," so the developer must've wizened up and changed the title in order to avoid the associated copyright issues.

Invaders is shiny, bright, loud, and a bit over-the-top all the way around. It has many of the bells and whistles you usually see with modern re-interpretations of "classic" games: fancy audio, bright colors, 3D-rendered graphics, fancy background screens, and features not seen in the original due to age (power-ups, speed adjustment, etc.)

Where Invaders falters, like so many other retreads of classics, is in the rhythm of the game play. It's amazing that such a simple game like Space Invaders, which has been remade ad-inifitum over the last couple of decades, is so hard to duplicate in a way that captures the game play and feel of the original. Sure, Space Invaders had very crude graphics, but it didn't matter: what made it great was the way it actually felt when you were playing it. At the end of the day, the souped-up graphics don't really matter; we just need a game that plays well enough that you feel connected with the game and your machine while you're playing it. The ideal action game interface is one where there's really no barrier between the player and what's going on in the game, so that you feel like you're actually there.

By default, Invaders requires use of the up-arrow key to fire. While you can remap the keys within the game (or use the stylus, which I don't really recommend), the controls fall a bit short of the mark. For starters, the fire rate is a bit too slow. While the "shots" (which are really rockets) have a neat effect of starting out slowly and then moving faster as they travel up the screen, the player ship feels sluggish and frustratingly underpowered. (G-Prime, one of the better SI clones I've seen in recent years, also had a firing rate that was a bit slow to my liking, but the controls were responsive enough that the game ended up being very playable anyway.)  Moving left and right in Invaders is also a bit sluggish, and sometimes the ship seems to have a little too much momentum. 

Invaders is by no means the worst Space Invaders clones out there; in fact, at least graphically, it's one of the better ones I've seen. The ability to remap controls is a good feature, since a lot of the clones don't even have that. While it's heart may be in the right place, it stumbles a bit in the game play department. The game is yet another instance where too much effort was funneled into making it look flashy and new (which sells the game, I'll admit), and too little effort went into the experience of playing the game. We don't really need fancy graphics; we just need crisp, responsive controls, speedy performance, and fluid game play in order to get involved with what's happening on the screen.

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.