Space Invaders Names!

[almightytodd]

The Space Invaders arcade game was one of the last, and arguably the best of the Black & White era. I've always felt that the fact that it was ported to the 2600 at all was a stunning achievement - given that the system was designed with built-in support for two players, two missiles and a background. Others have mentioned the challenges associated with a lower resolution available for the 2600 version, and there's also the problem that the arcade game was displayed in a portrait-orientation.

 

Obviously, compromises had to be made. But I believe the design choices were good, resulting in a very playable home game that offered a huge variety of options not available in the arcade, including two-player simultaneous cooperative mode. The graphics for the 2600 game are possibly the most hacked of any game, starting with the "official" hack to create "Pepsi Invaders". I enjoy having the option of playing the original in MAME, the original VCS version and associated hacks, and all of the various ports to 8-bit systems. I even like to crank up the TI Invaders port every now and then .

[Big_Mo]

Most home Space Invaders games don't get one major detail right:

 

The Invaders don't move simultaneously.

 

The original arcade game only updates the position of one Invader per frame. This results in the characteristic "ripple" you see across the formation early in the game. The more Invaders there are, the slower the formation moves. If there are 30 Invaders present it takes a full second for them all to take one step. When there are 10, they each take 3 steps per second. When there are 2, they each take 15 steps per second. They actually why they speed up.

Edited June 21, 2014 by Big_Mo