Virtually Overlooked: Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies

by JC Fletcher { Jun 19th 2008 at 9:00PM }

This year, is the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders' original Japanese release, and Taito has marked it with the release of Space Invaders Extreme on the DS and PSP, a significant upgrade to the original game with new powerups, music, and a beautiful new techno-rave sheen.

It's not the first time Taito has departed from the base Invaders formula. In 1995 (the less auspicious 17th anniversary of Space Invaders), Taito put out an arcade sequel to the primordial shmup that is every bit as visually divergent as Extreme, but in a totally different direction. Whereas the new handheld game goes for (and achieves) cool, Space Invaders '95 (known in Japan as Akkanvader) went in the wacky direction.

Space Invaders '95 takes every element of the original game and swaps out something adorable. Your tank is replaced by one of ten children, puppies, kittens, or Slime-looking characters (who may actually be poop), all in candy-colored, silly spaceships (the dog, for example, flies around in a trash can). After the first level, which imitates the original game (with your incongruously cute character on screen), the Invaders give way to rows of cutesy squid, octopi, chickens, ghosts, and pretty much anything else that can be given a silly face and rendered in hot pink pixels. If they were going to add color to Space Invaders, might as well add as many as possible, right?

Also unlike the original Space Invaders, '95 has bosses. As if just to prove that Taito had been paying a minimal amount of attention in the intervening years. Of course, the fact that Space Invaders '95 is pretty much exactly Taito's version of Parodius also helps prove that point.

The bosses are amazing: giant robot Invaders, bunny girls with lobster claws, psychotic sushi boats, and the like, all firing giant weapons and tiny clones at you. It's in these situations that your new ability to charge shots becomes useful. Although it's kind of sad to blow up something as awesome as the giant metal Invader seen above.

Yes, it's another shmup, but the Virtual Console currently has neither a parody shmup (Star Parodier is available in Europe and Japan) nor, shockingly enough, a Space Invaders game. And since everyone has played plain old Space Invaders a million times, we'd like to see this weird variant. Which will never, ever happen, because it's an arcade game. You can make a Space Invaders game scroll, but you can't play original arcade games on the Wii. You can play it on the PS2 Taito Legends 2 disc and pretend you're playing it on Virtual Console.

[Images via The Atari Thief]

Virtually Overlooked is a weekly feature that spotlights games that aren't yet on the Virtual Console, but should be. JC Fletcher is a wacky parody version of a real blogger. Want more Virtually Overlooked? Check out the first year!

Tags: arcade, shooter, space-invaders, space-invaders-95, taito