Super Space Invaders

That alien trainer wants people to drive off into space and buy a new car. But I'm younger and I prefer shooting aliens right here. Super Space Invaders is exactly that — a classic shooter in the spirit of Taito from 1992, which someone named as the official sequel to the famous eighties icon, even though it has almost nothing in common with the original except the idea.

It's a straightforward variation on a very old recipe. Your little ship sits at the bottom, aliens fall from above, you blast them with volleys. The more you moved left and right, the more room you had to maneuver. Once you've shot them all down, the next wave comes. That's the whole philosophy — nothing complicated, nothing invented.

The graphics are harshly plastic, those pixels look like someone assembled them from hard rubber. Sounds are flying everywhere, but they won't entertain you much — they're more like muffled clicks and squeaks, like a school gym alarm chirping from a distance. Controls are as simple as a slap — arrow keys left and right, spacebar to shoot. Nothing more to it.

The game doesn't care about balancing difficulty. Waves just pour in and pour in, getting faster and faster, without major changes in tactics. At first it's interesting, then it gets boring. It's missing what made the classic Invaders more engaging — some elegance in simplicity, built-up tension. Here it's just pinging without depth.

Today you can play it in DOSBox through your browser, if you're feeling nostalgic for how it looked in the computer lab. It's not terrible, but it's not a compelling reason to download it either. It's just another variation on a very old theme that failed to add anything meaningful. Super Space Invaders existed, and now it's just part of the archive of things that had the misfortune of being released too late, when the original was already long forgotten.