Return of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom

When you fire this thing up, you're not entirely sure if it's supposed to be a shooter, a puzzle game, or some kind of code experiment. Return of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom from 1995 is exactly the kind of DOS program you only come to understand gradually and with a fair amount of your own interpretation.

It's basically an arcade shooter where you face off against the aforementioned mutant space bats with gusto. The game isn't complex by any stretch — you move around the screen, shoot at enemies, and try to survive waves of their attacks. The setting is exactly what the title promises: a cheap sci-fi romp with no grand ambitions.

The gameplay, meanwhile, is simplicity in its purest form. The controls work, the graphics are functional in the least nonsensical sense of the word — plain scribbles in colors with no pretense of elegance. What does hold up — and this matters — is the feeling that something's happening. You shoot, things disappear, more appear. It's not genius, but it's oddly addictive in its own way. The catch is that after twenty minutes you already know what you're in for, and there's no variety to keep you hooked.

This type of game absolutely flooded the nineties — small, uninteresting, yet somehow captivating in their simplicity. Return of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom is a textbook example of that category of games you remember more for their name than their content. The title is better than the game.

These days I fire it up in DOSBox mainly to get it off my backlog. It's not evil, but it's not something I'd warmly recommend either. If you've got a few minutes and you're bored, give your brain a workout on this simple shooter. Don't expect anything more.