"An Action Packed Game Full Of Senseless Destruction And Heart Wrenching Tragedy"

The video game Space Invaders is one of the oldest video games ever, first appearing on either the Atari 2600, or in the arcades, if I remember correctly. And then, after years of waiting, the epic Space Invaders had finally come to the Nintendo Gameboy! Woop-a-dee-doo!

The gameplay, like in all the previous Space Invader games, remained the same. What you do is control a little tank, located at the bottom of the screen, and shoot ballistic weapons of mass destruction skywards at oncoming waves of evil alien foes. Everybody got that? Good. As I was saying, all you do is shoot aliens, but that's not the half of it! The aliens can also try to turn your tank into a lifeless smoldering crater with their missiles as well. Luckily, you have four huge floating block-like shield thingies that can draw fire from the aliens. Sadly, these huge blocks can be destroyed. As time goes by, the aliens will move closer and closer to the ground, which is a bad thing. For you see, upon reaching ground level, the aliens will destroy you, and all of humanity as well.

At first this game isn't all that hard at all. The aliens move side to side across the screen very slowly in the beginning, but as you begin to pick off a few of them, you'll begin to notice that they move faster. When there is only one alien scumbag remaining, things really get difficult. The stupid thing moves so quickly across the screen that you may have trouble catching up with it! After you destroy every alien, then you'll obviously progress to another level, each one slightly harder than the previous one. In every new level the aliens will appear closer to the ground than in the previous, making things extremely difficult as the game progresses.

The name ''Space Invaders'' really kind of gives you a picture of what the game's about. ''Hey look, aliens have come to Earth! Since they're different from us, we should blast them out of the sky with our advanced technology!'' But the aliens retaliate, and relentlessly attempt to take over the world, mercilessly killing any brave soul that dares stand in their way of complete global domination. Now, it's up to you, the player, to take control of a tank, and give the aliens hell by shooting them with missiles, until they are all destroyed. What a deep, heart touching story that was.

Remember how this game looked on the Atari? Well, the Gameboy version of Space Invader looks nearly the same, just everything is smaller. For those of you who haven't seen the Atari SP, and have no clue what I'm talking about, then let me break it down for you. The graphics aren't impressive at all. Some people even consider them to be unimpressive. The tank you pilot at the bottom of the screen is basically a horizontal line with a bump on the top, the missiles are vertical lines, and the big block shields are...well.....big blocks. The aliens and their ships are slightly more detailed. The alien UFO ships look somewhat like UFOs. The aliens though have some slight variety to them, as there are four different groups of aliens, each group looking stranger and more terrifying than the first.

Four sounds. Just four sounds in the whole entire game. COME ON! Here are all the sound effects in Space Invaders: beep, boop, beep (slightly more high pitched beep this time), boom. That's about it. But wait! We can't forget the awe inspiring music! The music consists of just one monotonous beep that repeats itself over and over. And that's not all! The more enemies you coldheartedly kill, the faster the music goes! Isn't that incredible? No, I don't think it is either!

Despite a bad story, worse graphics, and stupendously horrible sound quality, Space Invaders is terribly addicting, and if my stupid Gameboy still worked, I'd probably be playing it right now instead of writing this review for you heartless people. So...Space Invaders should be bought if the opportunity arises.

Space Invaders may not be the most perfect game in the world, but it still beats the crap out of other Gameboy games, more specifically, Pokemon. But hey, that's just my humble opinion.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/12/03, Updated 07/12/03