Space Invaders Extreme
There's nothing in the words "Space Invaders Extreme" that suggests you're about to have anything like a good time. Space Invaders may be the great-grandaddy of all shoot-em-up games, but that was thirty years ago, and it's been "updated" several times without success. Adding in the word "Extreme" doesn't help - it just suggests some Mountain Dew connection that I'm not comfortable with.
Starting the game up, then, required a bit of a leap of faith - but once I did, the intro screen gave that same reassurance that I felt upon seeing the first prototype of the 2010 Camaro in the flesh.
White bitmapped enemies scroll sideways along a stark black field, the only color being a minimalist yellow title on the top screen flanked by beautiful monochromatic hatch lines. The music pulses with mid-nineties technogenerica reminiscent of Underworld, the only overt sign that something new is about to begin.
Some things should never be remade. The film Bedazzled was perfect with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and the molestation it suffered at the hands of Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley should have earned it retribution at The Hague. Breathless was so audacious in its presumption to remake Godard's jump cut classic that I'm sure the French must still have a bounty on Richard Gere's head. No one can be happy about what has happened to Tab - if you see anyone drinking Tab Energy, just push them in front of a Red Bull truck and go celebrate with a real Tab Cola.
And yet. The Birdcage was superb, Little Shop of Horrors was even funnier with Rick Moranis, and Scarface, well, it speaks for itself.
The trick is to try and recreate the feeling one would have had encountering the original in its own time and place, not to simply remake it with modern references. It's a bit like the dialogue in Deadwood: real inhabitants of that South Dakota no man's land in the 1870s would have considered "hell" and "goddamn" to be the most outrageous profanities, but to get the same effect, audiences of 130 years hence needed much different language to get the appropriate air.
Space Invaders Extreme understands that, and playing it on the Nintendo DS gave me the same feeling I remember from the first time seven-year old me sat down to the original.
I'm sure there are rules to SIx, but they're no more important than the cycling images and animations that pass by in the background. Laser cannons, big blasts, bombs, varying sizes of enemies that split like amoeba, carry their own shields, or follow unprecedented patterns… exhortations to take out rows, columns, or colors for bonus points; all have some ambient purpose, but I don't worry about them any more than I worry about what the patterns and images in the distance are meant to be. It all runs together in a mélange of joyous shooting, shooting, and shooting.
The soundtrack, it turns out, is not just some background noise to remind the player that Karl Hyde exists. As you play, every action that you or the enemies take becomes a part of the score, so that I found myself shooting with a rhythm, the more excellent a noise to make. Hearing my shots cymbal crash into enemies was as satisfying as banging on kitchen pots with a wooden spoon.
If you do stop to examine the graphics, you'll see that the classic bitmapped enemies live in a world reminiscent of late '80s Vaughan Oliver album artwork, and it works perfectly. There is no surer way to go out of style than to stay up to date. The graphics of SIx feel like aesthetic decisions instead of technical ones, a distinction that I'm sure will make it as playable five years from now as it is today.
I can't call the gameplay purist - that would require, well, the original SI, I guess, but I can call it pure. There's no ridiculous messing about with storylines or justifications for the enemies - when the boss comes, it's announced as "Boss Attack - Ready?" When the calm female voice announced "fever time," I have no idea what it means except more shooting.
Space Invaders Extreme gives players a glimpse of what it was like to play Space Invaders for the first time. The feeling can best be expressed, appropriately enough, with a scene from War Games:
"What is all that stuff?"
"Trajectory headings for multiple-impact re-entry vehicles."
"What's a trajectory heading?"
"I have no idea."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know, but it's great!"
Making mistakes as a research method
A blog called SloshSpot ran an article entitled "The 10 Oldest Bars in the United States."
How did the author do his research? No idea. Whatever steps he took, he was wildly inaccurate, as many commenters on Digg.com and SloshSpot were quick to point out.
People were so quick to point out older bars that he had missed, that a thought struck me. How quickly would he have been able to solicit answers if he had simply run an article asking for the oldest bars in the United States?
By baldly stating that his list was correct, the author spurred a lot of people into action. Annoyed, indignant, completist, helpful, proud, angry, or just plain old knowitall, it doesn't matter - the rebuttals came fast.
Could it be that the best way to get answers from a large segment of people is to deliberately proclaim the wrong answers in public first?
The original list, and the updated, user-supplied corrections, after the jump.