The game I played most this week: AlienInvaders

Classic Arcade: AlienInvaders

Sigh. In the increasingly smaller market of games for standalone Pocket PCs, we have yet another slapdash Space Invaders clone. This one appears to be made strictly for Smartphones, although the MadBeetle Web site clearly shows separate versions for both mobile platforms.

What makes AlienInvaders particularly frustrating is that it actually looks pretty good graphically. The game objects have good color variation and are definitely better than average. The special effects?  Not bad. The sound isn't half-bad either, and is just about right for what you'd expect from a 1980s arcade game. The animation is very smooth as well. 

However, depending on the resolution of your device, you may have a very hard time seeing what's happening on the screen. On my Dell Axim, the game looks tiny and takes up about half the screen. This of course makes it difficult to even see what's happening, let alone get into the action.

The game's Web site suggests that the game works in every mode from 240x240 to 480x800, but trust me, if you have a high res device, the game won't look right. In order for a game to really work in those modes, it's not enough that it just runs in that mode, the graphics need to scale appropriately as well.  

The problems don't end there. AI looks like a game that could've played decently if more effort had been put into quality control. The game doesn't have any kind of auto fire feature, and the fire button is mapped directly to the action button.

Re-mapping the keys is possible, but doesn't seem to work all that well: I had to re-map the fire and pause/exit buttons several times, as the game seemed to ignore several of the combinations I tried. I never did get the pause/exit button to remap properly. (By default, the game wants you to press the "end call" button in order to quit, something that's obviously not possible for those of us running standalone Pocket PCs.)

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