Mersey Remakes

I seem to go long periods of time whereby I manage to blank out commercial games, however a while back friend of Mersey Remakes, Rich, dropped a trailer into the RR forums of a new Space Invaders game for the DS. After the colossal disappointment of the previous iteration, I feared the worst. Well, dear reader - I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when after viewing the trailer the only thoughts running through my tiny brain were “Holy Crap! They’ve made Space Invaders *good*”.

Of course, it’s quite often the case where a trailer for a game turns out to be immensely misleading and when the final product lands within your grubby mits, you’re left with nothing but a few quid down the pan and a sense of disgust at how the tardy product ever managed to escape from whatever studio responsible. And so, even with the trailer blowing your reporter away, there’s still that inescapable nagging doubt beavering away at the back of the mind. “But what if it is shit?”, the voices say.

I’m incredibly happy to say, Space Invaders Extreme (affiliate link there, Chaps) is anything but shit. In fact, it’s so far from shit they haven’t invented a superlative quite appropriate enough just yet. You see, I’ve never been a great fan of Space Invaders. Sure, I appreciate it’s heritage but it wasn’t really until Majestic Twelve came along that it managed to tickle my gameybones in an excitable manner. After that, things got pretty bleak for a while and I’d all but given up hope of finding an “official” Space Invaders game that made me a very happy bunny.

Now then, look at that! How could you not be impressed? It’s bright, it’s colourful and it’s definitely Space Invaders… but for the first time in many years it actually looks like a *modern* game. Now I know I’m easily impressed by flashy visuals at the best of times, more so flashy visuals made of purest pixel goodness but there’s nothing more iconic to me in gaming than a Space Invader so I’m allowed to drool. Mind you, all the glorious pixels in the world are for nowt if the game doesn’t hold your attention, and as I said above - Space Invaders Extreme manages that perfectly well. A bit too well, in fact. I’m running out of skin on my thumb.

By throwing in a myriad of combo systems (you can see some displayed on the screenshot up there, just in the background) - knocking off invaders of the same colour goes towards your combo’s, knocking them off in rows and columns (not always easy as the formations shift on each stage) adds towards your combo’s and getting those combo’s is really, really recommended - it’s one of the few ways that you’ll see the precious extra lives that the game really dislikes doling out to you. If you’re going to plough through all the stages, then you’ll need all the help you can get…

…because there’s bosses too. Each of the boss stages throws a different big bad ass invader at you, as you’d expect pushing the difficulty up a tad on each one and requires differing tactics to knock the buggers out. Normally, the boss scenes wouldn’t be anything too special but the nice use of the DS top screen for bosses to float around on adds a nice extra challenge to the proceedings.

There’s more to the game, of course, I haven’t even discussed fever time (which you dip into when you manage to knock out the right saucer and then complete a little mini-wave challenge), the roulette wheel, multiple weapons and different game modes. To be honest, any words I put down are likely to come across sounding much more boring than the game deserves. On paper, it probably does sound a bit gash but Space Invaders Extreme is one of the best examples of sheer wide cheese eating grinnery in games this year. Like XBLA’s Pacman CE and Jetpac Refuelled, Space Invaders Extreme makes you forget how long in the tooth the game you’re playing is but reminds you of why the game design is utterly wonderful to begin with.

If you’ve got a DS and even have a passing interest in shooting things up a bit, you owe it to yourself to pick up this game. If nothing else, maybe it’ll show companies that *this* is how you do it, not this. Best of all, it’s perfectly import friendly and as far as I can see, all in English.