Have you played Space Invaders for the PlayStation (Activision 1999)?

[MaximRecoil]

I bought this game back before I had a PC or knew about MAME, and the only reason I bought it was because on the back it said:

BONUS
Classic Arcade
Version in the Game!

The game starts out with a short 3D movie (which can be skipped) showing the old derelict tank from 1978 (from the original game), and then a wave of aliens appears in the sky and a guy in a modern tank comes out and starts shooting them down.

So I just wanted to play the original arcade version, but it was nowhere to be found on the start screen. I figured it must be something like Donkey Kong 64 where you had to find/unlock the original arcade Donkey Kong somewhere so I started playing the game.

I don't even really care for the arcade Space Invaders (at the time that I bought the remake, I'd never played the original arcade version; I'd only played home console ports of it, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about); but the remake was fun. Even my nephew liked it, and he hates the original Space Invaders.

One of the best things about this game is that it allows 2 players simultaneously, which makes an already fun game even more fun.

The game also has "power-ups" that drop from the UFOs that pass across the top of the screen if you shoot them. The best power-up is the "double shot" (double shot was an undocumented feature in the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders which made the game more fun to play than the arcade version IMO). Double shot means you can have two shots in the air at once (like Galaga), rather than just one (like Galaxian or the original Space Invaders). There is also a shield you can get which provides limited protection from alien fire and other forms of attack.

The defense barriers are not in every level, and are in varying locations in the levels that they do appear in. Firing at them does not chip away at them like in the original game, but rather, it moves them higher up the screen with each shot. If an alien hits one of them, it destroys the alien. However, they can only take so many hits from firing or aliens crashing into them before they disappear/fall away.

There is a second button in this game which fires a special weapon when it is powered up. The special weapons include a super missile that will take out a whole column of aliens with one shot; one that will hit one alien and then go to the right or left taking out the rest of the row of them; one that hits one alien and then splits off into a "Y" shape taking out aliens in a diagonal pattern; one that shoots a thick lingering energy beam column to the top of the screen and you can move your tank left or right and instantly destroy all aliens in its path; one that allows your tank to shoot up to the top of the screen, instantly destroying all aliens in the tank's path both on the way up and on the way back down; and a few others.

Using some of the special weapons effectively, requires strategy. For example, if you have the weapon that hits one alien and then veers horizontally to the right, you don't want to use it on e.g., the alien in the lower right hand corner of the formation, because it will only kill that one alien and then shoot harmlessly off the screen to the right.

Also, to get the special weapons in the first place requires strategy, because you have to shoot 4 aliens in a row that are of the same type.

You start out on Pluto, face 10 waves of aliens, and then a boss. You progress through the planets, each one having some new types of aliens with different attacks (for example, on one of the planets there are "kamikaze" aliens, that drop down to try to smash your tank after they've been shot) until you get to earth and face the final boss (which looks like one of the giant aliens depicted on the Space Invaders arcade machine sideart). Once you beat the final boss, you've beaten the game and it unlocks the original arcade version of Space Invaders, which is well-emulated, but stretched to fill a horizontal 4:3 TV.

The only thing I don't like about this game is the load times, but that applies to all PlayStation games. If this was run on a MAME cabinet with a PS emulator I think the load times would not exist because of the speed at which it can read from a mounted ISO on a hard drive. I think this game would be a lot of fun on a MAME machine (especially with two people), but unfortunately I don't have one.

[Shortbus]

yes, i've played it and it is great, and very addicting....