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Space Invaders will have their revenge upon Wii owners next week, as Square Enix and Taito bring Space Invaders Get Even to WiiWare. The game, announced earlier this year exclusively for the Wii's downloadable game service, puts players on the invading side in a war against Earth's defence forces.
It's time for your Wii update, and this week we get an excellent example of the range of Nintendo's WiiWare program. On one hand, we have Strong Bad Episode 4: Dangeresque 3 (1,000 points), the latest in Telltale's excellent series of adventure games based on the characters from Homestarrunner.com, and on the other, bean bag tossing. Target Toss Pro: Bags (700 points) is a game from Incredible Technologies that promises all the fun of tossing bean bags at stuff. Judging by the colon in the title, I am assuming that there will be a wide range of Target Toss Pro games that allow you to throw different things. Think I'll hold off until Target Toss Pro: Kittens comes out.
During one of our jaunts to a Japanese arcade earlier this month, I noticed quite a bit of promotion around Space Invaders' 30th Anniversary.
Taito's Space Invaders went supernova in late 1970s Japan and even caused a national coin shortage! Yokai Attack! co-author Matt Alt was a gaming nut back then, putting an endless stream of quarters into arcade game after arcade game. When he was seven years old, he sat down and composed his first opus space invaders, based on the classic Taito title. Recently found at his grandparents' house, it reads:
The space invaders took off in their spaceship shooting their lasers at some ships. A laser hit their ship; it crashed. The space invaders got out just in time! When the ship blew up, the fire was so bright it looked like a sun! They built a bigger and better ship. It took 10 weeks to build. As time went by, the ship got bigger and bigger! The time came when the space invaders invaded earth! There were no bad things, like fires or stealing. They made some friends and had to get their computers help to take off. They went to ziron home base, 50,0000 miles from earth.
Whew! So glad to know that when the space invaders finally do come, there will be no bad things like fires or stealing.
Nov. 2, 1980 [Alt Japan]
We say inevitable because, really, by 2008 it's one of the last things that hasn't seen some kind of Space Invaders cash-in. And while we'd be well within our rights to loathe this particular tie-in, what with the fact Space Invaders isn't really a PC "thing" and the fact you can't see the letters on the keys, we're going to set our blasters to stun and go easy on it. Because not only does it looks surprisingly appropriate, with all the bad guys the keys and the spacebar our lone hero, it's modelled on the new Mac keyboards, which we wish more PC hardware types would take heed of.
space invaders bendiboard keyboard [technabob]
We'd like to see games as art. Even those of us who'd personally rather just shoot stuff, thank you very much, realise in general that "games as art" might be a simple way to vault them into the sphere of mainstream relevance, earn them appreciation and understanding from an audience that currently, unjustly, looks down on them.
We love, of course, when games have themes and messages, when they offer the player a choice - this equates to more complexity, we feel, this places a game on level with other media that aim to make us feel. There's an entire segment of the audience that devotes itself to finding the emotional moments in games; we write essays, post blogs and have forum discussions about Little Sisters, about holding hands with Yorda or getting rid of GLaDOS.
And many of us have even accepted, to some extent, that games are currently a little bit self-referential and insular. They often tread dangerously in the direction of comic books, which by giving comic book fans only and exactly what they wanted, ended up being of interest only to comic book fans and no one else. We see that games, as an interactive medium, have much greater potential than this.
But what happens when a game doesn't create the message from inside its fictional world, but uses a message that already exists?
What if "games as art" in the real world actually looks like something we really, really don't like?
Let's talk about Invaders!.
Digital artist Douglas Edric Stanley requested that his interactive installation Invaders! be pulled from the Games Convention show floor on Friday. The motion-controlled Space Invaders remake, featuring two continually crumbling World Trade Centre towers, was yanked after negative response, one that Stanley referred to as "immature" and "lacking the sophistication and consideration that other parts of the world have shown the work".
In place of the Invaders! exhibit, Stanley's full statement in English and German was projected on the massive screen. We're still waiting to receive comment from Games Convention organisers on their reaction to the removal of the art installation.
Artist Douglas Stanley has asked the organisers of the Leipzig Games Convention to "simply turn off" his art installation, which features a mash-up of the attack on the World Trade Centre and Space Invaders, at the show.
On his website Stanley says simply that he's given the group permission to turn off the exhibit, and then hours later writes that a statement on his website can be considered his official reason for taking down the display. Stanley also mentions on his site that he has received death threats since his exhibit first appeared on Kotaku and then in national and international press.
The decision comes the day Taito said they may be seeking legal action against the artist.
