Sunday, February 13, 2011

Space Invaders Infinity Gene review

Space Invaders is a pretty old vimeo game. It's one of those games that it's cool to tell people you like it. Sort of like how people will talk about how they love to play Pac-Man or how the best vimeo game ever is Galaga. They're okay games I guess, if you like to ignore every single better game that has come out since then - which these people probably do. Either that or these people just like these games for the cooldude points they get from talking to other people who know even less about vimeo games than they do. I hardly ever play these games, and I bet the people who claim they love them have played them even less than I have. I don't feel like reviewing the original Space Invaders from 1978, so here's a review of a new version of it I played on PS3 that was released recently:

Space Invaders Infinity Gene
- developer: Taito
- publisher: Square-Enix
- for: iOS
- ports for: Xdude 360, PS3
- on: you can't display it on a shelf because it's a download
- released: 2009/07/27 (iOS), 2010/09/14 (PS3), 2010/09/15 (Xdude 360)
- type of vimeogame: Spaceship Shooting Game

At first this game is like Space Invaders. You get a spaceship that can only move left and right, and it sucks at shooting. And then the game changes and becomes completely different as you keep playing, giving you things like super rapid fire, the ability to move everywhere on the screen, and different weapons to choose from before starting a stage. The game will tell you some quote about evolving and adapting while it does this. I guess you're supposed to adapt to Space Invaders becoming not Space Invaders. The original Space Invaders had an interesting thing going on with the destructible barriers between you and the aliens, and how you're going to automatically lose if you don't make sure to kill all the bad guys, but this game is all tons of bad guy formations flying around all over the place while you whale on them.

There are wire frame graphics everywhere in this game. It looks kind of boring. In addition to the standard alien enemies, there's a bunch of random shapes that fly around for you to shoot at. All your favorites are here, such as star, hexagon, the other hexagon with two lines in it, large wireframe battleships with rectangles inside of them, and I think I even saw octadecahedrons.

I quickly found the real reason to play this game: the Music Mode. What the game does is take a music file you pick from the hard drive, and then construct a stage based on that file while it plays that music as the stage music. I had a lot of fun playing music from other spaceship shooting games and pretending to myself that I was playing a better spaceship shooting game instead of Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Also fun is playing music that is totally inappropriate for a spaceship shooting game, like Lady Gaga music. I guess that you could just instead play any other spaceship shooting game with the music volume set at zero and have something playing on your laptop though, and it'd be better. This game only lets you have one song per music stage and do one music stage at a time, so when the boss appears, it just loops the song from the beginning again. I've never felt the need to change a game's music something else though. Games's normal music always suits them just fine, unless I'm making a youtube video of me playing the game. Then I would have to replace the normal music with Korn.

I rate this spaceship shooting game 0 out of 2.

1 comment:

Scott Bay said...

I second this rating, despite having not played or even seen this game.