3D Invaders
Space Invaders was a huge hit when it was first released. I think every machine has a version of it somewhere. Some bright spark sitting in the Amsoft basement no doubt thought, “ We should do that, but to make it better, make it 3D!
Story:
The Aliens called Quarks.
Which is weird because although Amsoft were the publisher, the game was written by Quark Data. Is this a subtle foreshadowing of the alien invasion?
Anyway, the aliens are trying to invade your base.
There isn’t any real explanation as to why they want your base. I’m gonna be honest, the base appears to be either invisible or just a single line; those aliens are gonna be upset.
Game Play:
Have you ever played Space Invaders and thought, “This would be so much better in 3D”? Well, I have some exciting news for you. This is Space Invaders, but in 3D! Except it isn’t, of course, it’s 2D, so you can go left and right, but also forward and back. I know how exciting it is. I wonder how this extra dimension will affect gameplay?
Going left to right is fine (if not really slow), but the forward and back movement is a bit of a mess. At first, you think you move between the lines painted on the floor, but you don’t. The lines appear to serve no purpose at all except to confuse me.
You can move in two directions at once (well, one x and one y direction, otherwise that’s just daft), which they brag about in the instructions, but is quite frankly not something I would have thought was a brag. It’s like when DVDs used to put an interactive menu on their list of special features.
The aliens move in a predictable pattern, and they shoot their laser in a pattern, but, and this is a big but, it is really hard to know which y-axis they are shooting from. You spend most of the game getting killed by lasers that were nowhere near you.
Shooting the aliens is just a case of pressing the fire button, but again, it’s not that easy to figure out which y-axis you are on in order to hit the aliens you need to.
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All of this aside, the real issue is, what the fudge are the aliens actually attacking? There is nothing there to even indicate a base, a house, or a small sausage factory.
Graphics:
I’m not really sure what the Aliens are supposed to be; they look like deer skulls, but that would be a bit weird. Perhaps they have space ships shaped like deer skulls, like they are Goth Aliens.
Your laser thing is a pyramid; it is literally the laziest sprite ever. Unless it’s supposed to be deep, like ancient Egypt built the pyramids as giant lasers to fend off the Goth Aliens. Or maybe I give too much credit to Amsoft here.
Everything flickers, like really flickers. To make things worse, everything changes colour randomly for seemingly no reason at all.
Box Art:
Clearly, someone down with Kevin in the art department discussed the game in great detail, and Kevin decided to draw some aeroplanes, except he can’t draw them very well at all.
The red lines, I have to assume, are laser beams or a possible red string. Maybe they aren’t badly drawn planes at all; they are, in fact, kites. That would make sense as to why the aeroplanes are so badly drawn, they are really badly made Chinese kites.
Why exactly they are flying kites during a nuclear explosion is happening in the background, but I’m not a kite flyer, maybe they are riding the thermals or something.
Impression:
Did I say this game was awful? I feel like I might have mentioned it. Well, it really is that bad. It’s hard to play, and any fun is sucked out by the insane difficulty in figuring out which row is shooting.
What would have made far more sense was to make a really good version of Space Invaders first and then attempt to add the 3D element later. Instead, it feels like they decided it was a good idea but didn’t actually have a plan as to how it would work.
What I always find funny about Amsoft games is the idea that they were supposed to create an actual game library for the CPC on its release. In practice, it’s a genius idea, but in reality, they were mostly so awful that they would have made people avoid it.
