Good evening everyone! I hope everyone had a pleasant Labor Day holiday yesterday. This week, I'm going to be doing a GameOn series which I feel as if I hadn't in the longest time. Each of the four days, I will be talking about a sort of "Shmups" (shortened for Shoot-em-ups) sub-genre. Today, I will be talking about Space Invaders of the past and now.
Source: Youtube Channel pspshow
Space Invaders is one of the earliest shooters that I played when I was a little kid. It was a simple objective, but a difficult task. Shoot-em-ups consists of a level of enemies that the player has to mow down to progress. For Space Invaders, it was a single screen game where a bunch of aliens planning on invading Earth. The player takes the role of a single fighter and shoots them out of space and from invading and destroying the player and earth. In the past 25 years or so, Space Invaders have gone through many iterations with little to no change at all but has introduced things such as power ups, special aliens, and different aspects that changes the game around. Space Invaders is still played today, even if it looks and plays differently. It still has that frantic feeling of the last alien whizzing down the screen. It's still fun for me, but has been overshadowed by many other sub-genre of shooters. I would call this an Arcade Shooter (I guess it's called a "Fixed shooter" on Wikipedia, makes sense) because of its history of shoot-em-ups in arcades with Galaga, Galaxian, and such being the popular shooters during those days. You can probably find a site that still has the original Space Invaders for you to play, and there's also many iterations of Space Invaders all around on different consoles and sites. Space Invaders certainly isn't the first shooter or game to come out, but it is one of the most influential ones that have paved the way for other Shmups.
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