Space Invaders

In July 2011, a strange news item appeared from the movie industry. "Space Invaders is Headed to Big Screen." Just realize what you're actually reading. They. Are. Going. To. Make. A. Space. Invaders. Movie. I'm sure someone snapped and went crazy. What the heck will this movie be about? I have no clue.

The news got even worse when I read that American movie producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura will be attached to the Space Invaders movie. This man is partly responsible for three of the worst movies in recent history, and that are, of course, all three recent Transformers-movie. Nothing ruined childhood memories worse. Couldn't he tell director Michael Bay to use a tripod instead of slinging his camera around the entirety of the movie? It's as if he was on speed. Couldn't he check for a decent script with an actual plot instead of continuous humbug and incomprehensible story lines? Among other things, Lorenzo di Bonaventura also produced the mediocre movie "Doom," based on the classic first-person shooter. Now, this guy is going to produce Space Invaders: The Movie! This isn't a nightmare. This is actually going to happen.


To calm my thoughts I needed to go back and play the original game. With so many versions to choose from, I opted for the WonderSwan edition. Taito let SunSoft handle the WonderSwan port, and they did a mediocre job. However, one thing is unique about this game: It's the first verison of Space Invaders I played that's entirely in the Japanese language instead of English. Of course, that doesn't matter in any way for the gameplay. But it means that I have no idea what the available options are and if there are actually different modes.

So that leaves me just with a very boring edition of Space Invaders. SunSoft really wants to let you know that they are really inspired by the original because the intro screen shows, in HUGE moving numbers, the year "1978" (when Space Invaders was first released) and some Japanese gibberish (probably just meaning 'Space Invaders' in Japanese).


It is nice Sunsoft was inspired by the original, but this black & white edition of the game doesn't push the capacities of the Wonderswan in any way. It looks very blank, it's a little too slow and the sound is annoying. Control on the other hand is all right -- but then again, it's very hard to mesh up just moving to the left an right and shooting. It's not really awful, but the game just feels so dull you can't help but yawn after playing for a couple of minutes.

Don't get me wrong. Space Invaders is true classic and with a little bit of modernization it's still very playable -- as is shown by the recent Space Invaders Extreme games. I'm just not very fond of this WonderSwan port, thanks in large part to SunSoft's laziness. But I'm sure playing this will always be better than watching the upcoming Space Invaders movie.