[#] Space Invaders (Activision, 1999)

The songs you grow to like never stick at first.

Didn't your mother ever teach you not to judge a book by its cover? Mine didn't, and that probably explains something. Still, this game drew me in in a weird way, so let me give you the Wikipedia rundown of PS1 Space Invaders so I can make my point. It's a 3D remake of the original, ten waves to a planet, each with bosses and aliens with funny attacks and power-ups, and you can unlock the original emulated Space Invaders. It was a little slow and easy at first, and I had a pretty middling review written up for it and scheduled for weeks—and then I went to try out its RetroAchievements set.

RetroAchievements is a site that gives you achievement sets, points, and trophies for various emulated retro games. If that sounds dumb to you, hold on. RA has given me reason to dive into games I'd written off as stupid, simplistic, frustrating even, to learn how to beat them or to get the high scores, and I walk away with a new appreciation for them every time. I thought the original Space Invaders was just obnoxiously difficult and required ungodly reflexes until I learned of the "wall of death" setup that turns the pace outright leisurely, making the "4,000 points without dying" achievement a game of clean execution instead. Suddenly way more fun, cool as shit now.

Just so you don't think I wrote this solely to glaze RA, let me talk some about the remake. Shooting four aliens of a color in a row will give you a powerup based on their own attack. The horizontal sweep weapons and the laser are easily the best in the game, and there is actually a lot of satisfaction to taking out a whole row or column with one shot. You get into the groove of clearing waves, visually, it's solid and clean, you can save at any time, and if you're looking for a challenge, you do get it on the higher difficulties. Like the arcade original, Space Invaders is definitely a little underwhelming at first blush, but dig into the details and you might just find some appreciation for it.