Format: iPhone
Release: Out now
Publisher: Taito
Developer: In-house
Direct App Store download

Like spry widowers who end up racing about some eternal fairway as soon as their beloved wives are safely underground, Space Invaders has found an unexpected energy in old age. Granted, it’s happened in stages: where they once flickered arthritically back and forth, inching ever lower as they wore grooves of dusty light into a million arcade screens, Space Invaders Extreme saw Taito’s venerable coin-cruncher burst into colour, bloating to three times their size, wobbling, distorting, and haemorrhaging power-ups as they exploded. And now, Infinity Gene takes things even further, sending the diminutive armada buzzing across the iPhone in shifting clouds, warping in and out of existence, venting babbles of light and strange electronic noises, and accompanying massive silver freighters through the playing field. It’s astonishing in its stylish big-beat rowdiness: the most predictable of series has become distinctly flighty, a game about counting the seconds between shots has steadily transformed into a sweaty fumble for every millimetre of empty space.

In amongst the neon muddle is a control scheme micro-surgically tailored to the needs of the game’s new home. Shooting is, wisely for the iPhone, an automatic process, and with one finger planted behind your tiny craft (or anywhere else on the screen if you fancy a challenge), your sole job is to manoeuvre around the scrolling battlefield, keeping out of harm’s way, taking down the enemy, and collecting the power-ups that often spew out of them when they die. That’s because, inevitably, along with Extreme’s trendy synaesthesia, Space Invaders has embraced levelling up, every few minutes of gameplay giving you new toys ranging from better weapons to graphics galleries. It’s voguish, to be sure, as is the ability to generate levels from your iPhone’s music catalogue (the level is the same each time for each song - we recommend Beauty Queen by Roxy Music), but it all fits together surprisingly well, the series’ central concerns remaining skeletal enough to accommodate a bit of extra fat, while pushing your luck to collect spinning baubles ensures you play with a constant daredevil streak, embracing your new ability to move up and down the screen as well as just back and forth.

And the shortish campaign rarely runs out of invention: backdrops flutter, spasm, and burst into fractals while a steady production line of new craft zip past, some firing out silvery threads of death, others spinning and shrinking in their brief few seconds of life. Enemies explode with a staticky buzz, familiar faces giving way to colossal geometrical war machines, while levels steadily grow more claustrophobic, throwing up unexpected chicanes and seeking to trap you as they scroll. And on top of that, your evolving arsenal of weapons can make things come alive for a second, third, and fourth pass, with lasers that home in on invaders in tight right angle turns, spread attacks, and a handful of other delights, all suggesting their own strategies.

It’s hard to tell whether the game has lost its mind, but it hasn’t lost its soul. In fact, despite the gradual transition from discipline to freewheeling spectacle, Space Invaders remains true to its basic principles of timing and positioning, if not its original pace. Sometimes, as you play through suites of levels with names seemingly culled from Orbital B-sides, the old attack patterns fleetingly reform, stitching themselves together out of the chaos of vectors and starscreams for a single instant before fragmenting again, as if the development team are reliving some half-understood folk memory. Perhaps they should have called it Infinity Meme.

The constant power-ups can occasionally make the whole thing feel a little sugary, however, and few, if any, of the game’s tricks are genuinely unprecedented, but in these relatively early days of the iPhone, competence is not yet something you can take for granted, and real style is a rarity to be cherished. More than that, there’s something poignant about Taito’s latest: Space Invaders still has something to say about the changing face of videogames. Where they used to be concerned with little more than punishment and restarts, generally fuelled by the chatter of coins through a slot, they’re now about unfolding visual delight and endless rewards. Vivid, smart and perhaps a little mocking, then, Infinity Gene, like Extreme, has exchanged the cold depths of space for the trippy vortex of some strange digital migraine: this classic isn’t growing old with grace, but it’s certainly continuing to evolve. [8]