Geocities Redux: Space Invaders

I believe I first played Space Invaders at Glen’s Pizza in Flanagan, Illinois. Flanagan was the closest town to the farm I grew up on, and Glen’s was the only pizza place there. They did a nice little thin crust pizza.

I loved the art on the machine almost as much as playing the game: these weird energy creatures hurling missiles Zeus-style down at your sorry ass.

Later, when my family got an Atari 2600 (back then it was the Atari Video Console System) my sister and I played a lot of Space Invaders on it. Sure, we played other games. Lots of other games. But nowadays when you can download damn near every Atari game they made, I find myself playing Space Invaders over and over again.

For all its graphical crudeness, Space Invaders was an elegant game design. It had a sense of psychology to it. These days, video games tend to be graphical masterpieces but sometimes they fall down in terms of plot, pacing, or storyline. Space Invaders managed to deliver on all of these items, admittedly in a minimalist way.

First, the premise was a classic: stop the inexplicable Other from attempting to take over your world. Nothing fit better in the Reagan 80’s remix of 50’s cold war paranoia.

Maybe I watched too many old black-and-white B-grade sci-fi flicks as a youth, but the premise clicked for me right away. Zap the bug-eyed monsters from outer space. Right now! Who knows what they will do to us if they land?

The gameplay was simplicity itself: joystick moved you side-to-side. Press the button to fire the gun straight up. You faced two main complicating factors. For starters you could only have one bullet on the screen at time. This fact meant that a clean miss cost you precious seconds that you didn’t have. You were trying to stop an alien invasion, for chrissake! When is that gun going to reload?

The other complication was the three barriers that hovered just above your little battle platform. Ostensibly these things were there to shield you from alien fire. And I did duck behind them plenty of times. Unfortunately they all too often shielded the aliens from a shot I was trying to line up. Heck, sometimes I found it necessary to blast a hole through my own defenses.

Above all other considerations, the thing that made the game truly one of the best of all time was the nature of the Invaders themselves. They came in a confusing variety of weird designs, yet they attacked in well-ordered, tightly disciplined formations.

What were these creeps? Why were they working together? The extra creepy part was the fact that the invaders had eyes, they had faces. For the love of God, Montresor, they had faces. Those weren’t gigantic alien saucers coming at you, they were space monsters. These handfuls of freakishly arranged pixels filled me with uncertainty and dread. The only thing I knew for sure was that they had to die.

So I blasted ‘em and blasted ‘em. And then they would go into uberweird mode. As the number of invaders dwindled on the screen, the speed of the survivors increased. Soon the last few would be flying like madasses, trying to blast me, the lone defender of the Earth, to smithereens. Those last seconds of the round were tense, because hitting the last Invader was hard. One miss and I’d be kicking myself as your laser blast crept up the screen. Meanwhile, the last baddie kept getting closer and closer.

And if even one of those bastards planted their tentacles or whatever on good old Mother Earth, that’s it. Game over. You lose. You let the earth be conquered by the Nazi Mutant Hell-creatures or whatever. Smooth move, ex-lax.

But what if you got that last guy? Somewhere the bug-eyed overleader yawns at the report that one of his 200 bazillion legions being destroyed by primitive apemen. “Send in another legion. Maybe one with training or some field experience.”

So another space army would appear on your screen. They warp in from hyperspace a little bit closer to Earth than the last one. They’d be just a hair faster than the previous squad. And they would slowly creep toward you, using the exact same tactics as the guys you just blew up. It was almost as if by stopping the first batch of monsters I had made things worse, not better.

It was as if the makers of Space Invaders had managed to tap into a sort of bleak, nihilistic heroism. You look into the sky and see an enemy that you can’t comprehend, much less defeat. They are numerous beyond counting. You have no chance against them. They will conquer the Earth. Despite knowing these facts, you choose to fight. Better to die free than live a slave! Aieeeee!

What a great game.

Dig these screenshots from Space Invaders '95 disproving my theory that any game can be improved with a little toilet humor!

Do you remember when video games were cool, when hot chicks used to hang out at arcades? Me neither.

By Thrazar's Katzbalger!

So here's a fun little toy I found via a link on my buddy's blog. It takes a text input (a name) and puts it through mathemagraphical transmogrifications to turn it into some sort of fantastic weapon. For example, I type 'Thrazar' and got this:


A katzbalger is obviously a blade of some sort but I had to look it up on the Wikipedia to find out more.

Review: Delving Deeper - Gnome

John Adams of Brave Halfling Publishing was kind enough to send me a copy of his outfit's new PDF for Labyrinth Lord-playable gnomes. Delving Deeper - Gnomes is a three page PDF written by Luke Fleeman with the cover by Jason Braun. Since the first page is the neat cover by Mr. Braun and the last page is the Open Game License, we're only talking about one page of gameable content. Even at 75 cents for the download some people might find it hard to swallow paying for such a small dose of gaming material. Personally, I don't find cost per page analyses to be very useful. Either I need a page full of gnome stats or I don't and either this particular product helps my game or it doesn't. At under a buck the cost is so close to free I just don't consider it a relevant issue. But I got a comp copy, so what do I know?

The gnome as presented by Mr. Fleeman gives an operational framework that includes both of the mechanical aptitude of the tinker gnome archetype and the illusionist magic of the pre-Dragonlance era version. The mechanics are straightforward, relying on previously established LL/D&D norms. I like the class. It's simple enough to be used for NPCs and I would definitely try it as a player. In fact, I think I like this incarnation of the gnome more than any other version I've seen to date.

I do have three little issues with this product. First is the XP chart. Per Fleeman gnomes need 4,065 experience points to get to second level. That's the same as an Elf run under Labyrinth Lord. I just don't buy the implication that the two classes are equivalent in power. The Elf is better than the Gnome in in terms of hit points, spell ability, armor usage and attacks. My gut tells me these disadvantages are not offset by the gnomes mechanical ability, 90' infravision or better saves. The point is debatable, but the XP chart was a definite WTF? moment for me.

The second issue that may annoy some people is that the Delving Deeper version of the gnome doesn't interact with the gnome as presented in the Labyrinth Lord rulebook. Gnomes in LL are creatures of base 1d8 hit dice and leader types of up to 4HD ability. None of these NPC gnomes have any spell abilities, so it is impossible to stat up baseline LL gnomes with this class. I don't consider that a huge issue, but I wouldn't have minded a second page (or even half a page) with rules and XP chart for more fighterish gnomes like in the main rulebook.

Finally, that 90' infravision I mentioned before bugs me a little. In my games I try to take dungeoneering seriously and just handing out infravsion that's 150% better than standard to some pudknocker illusion jockies rubs me the wrong way. I doubt it would screw up things up, but I don't like messing with dungeon operations without clear signs that the implications have been thought through.

None of these issues is a dealbreaker for me. As I said, I like this class. I would have no problem using it in my campaign, though I would do so in the form of additional rules to supplement the pre-existing version of the gnome. So in my campaign world the Delving Deeper rules would describe a magic-using subset of the overall gnome population. I haven't decided yet whether to update my "How to Make a PC" handout to include gnomes or not, but the very fact that I'm considering doing so is a pretty positive sign.

You can get your own copy of Delving Deeper - Gnome and lots of other cool Brave Halfling Publishing products at their YourGamesNow page or at the Old School Renaissance.

I said "Happy Shatnerday!"

Thanks to Mr. Castle for suggesting this one.

from the bygone era of a few years ago

So GeoCities is being sent to the termination booth in the near future. My earliest webpages were done on GeoCities, before I switched to Tripod and later focused on this here blog. As a way of keeping some of this stuff from going the way of the dodo, I'll be doing some reposting here. Today I'll be starting with my old quotes file.

[Psycho Dave] was the only guy I know who used a random monster encounter chart for Call of Cthulhu. You haven't lived until you've had a character go mad because he saw a nightgaunt sitting in a restroom stall reading a copy of the Necronomicon.

-Al Bruno III


Star Wars probably wouldn't have been quite as big a success if Darth Vader had been named Mungo Dingleberry, Luke had been Willmer Dadlikemey and Obi-Wan been Dingo Frootbat.

-Marius Bredsdorff, Godless Commie


I wish I could find some people to play straight up OD&D. No character development, no nothing. Just a posse and a dungeon. And also, a dragon.

-King of NoPants, Pantsless Wonder


a bad GM won't be able to keep even a game of Dungeons and Dragons from overwhelming him

-Kevin Maginn, talking smack in his review of Nobilis


The original D&D seems, quite obviously, to be a pastiche of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard adventure stories, set in a Tolkeinian world of Moorcockian morality, using Jack Vance's magic system, redacted for multiple protagonists. No wonder things are confused.

-Kenneth Hite


The other night, I whipped out my Rules Cyclopedia and B2 Keep on the Borderlands. We had an absolute freaking blast.

-Jeffrey A. Webb


How many times can you meet at the Gold Dragon Inn to go off to far away StrangeLand and fight the evil mage BadGuy?

-Gary Pellino


AD&D has probably brought more new gamers to the hobby than all other games combined. On that merit alone, it deserves our respect. Of course, for some of us, that's AD&D's only merit. But that's another story altogether.

-Jake de Oude


I'm afraid that nostalgia clouds my thoughts so much when it comes to discussing any version of DnD that I find myself at a loss. I always start drifting of into daydreams where Elf and Dwarf are classes and The Caves of Chaos are the only rpg lovin that I need.

-Chris Edwards, on the Forge

random thoughts

The part of me that appreciates the romantic allure of worldbuilding rarely shows up to the game table. When it comes time to roll dice I need a board the players can move their pieces across more than a dreamscape for shared hallucination.

Would chess be less popular without the fluff of kings and queens and their servants going to war? What if the knight wasn't shaped like a horsey or the rook like a tower?

A simple rule that approximates the desired effect is often better than a complex rule that hits the nail squarely on the head.

For every Gygax quote there is an equal and opposite Gygax quote.

Joe the Fighter and Bob the Magic-User fight orcs and giant rats in the Generic Dungeon of Randomized Peril. If everyone had a good time, would it necessarily have been better if the setting was less vanilla? If the session was a dud, would anything have been gained by glitzing up the joint?

she's doing fine

Thanks for all the sympathetic inquiries about my wife's illness. Turned out to be one of those 24 hour bugs. And so far she hasn't passed it on to the rest of the family.

By the way, did you see Oddysey's comment suggesting the use of the Oriental Adventures family chart for Traveller nobility? As Lord Kilgore responded, that's genius. Getting good comments rules!

Maybe I need to throw together some Trav-oriented random family legacy charts similar to the ones in OA. A d66 chart ought to do it.