This remake (also previously made on the DS and PSP) changes all that.  While it still is good old Space Invaders, the game takes on a combination of Pac Man’s Championship addition style of gameplay and Lumines’ side for audio and visual.  Just like Pac Man Champ, the game is more fast paced.  Instead of filling up the entire screen with invaders that will just repeat over again once you kill them all, it fills up the screen with fewer invaders that appear in different waves and patterns after each one.  Your little pea shooter fires faster than the oringial (still one bullet at a time however) and will get faster the more invaders you kill as your cannon “levels up.”  Killing mulitple enemies in a row stacks up chains and increases your score multiplier, but stray too far inbetween kills and it will go down.  Don’t get reckless either, as losing a life also drops your cannon down by two levels.

The game takes on a more strategic approach than the original, almost like a puzzle game and shmup combined together.  Invaders come in multiple colors, and if you kill four in a row of the same color without changing, they will drop a powerup.  Green invaders drop a spread gun, (do not think Contra, that would just be insane) red invaders drop a gun that shoots bombs that can explode on impact, killing nearby invaders, and blue invaders, my favorite, drop a super sweet pulse laser where you can simply drill through multiple invaders with just one swoop.  There are also gray invaders which drop shields, protecting you from bullets, and crappy white invaders that don’t drop anything at all.  (However killing them does not break a color combo.)

The game is far from difficult, even the last stage.  Enemy bullets travel very slow and usually only in straight lines.  Some will explode, others will ricochet of walls.  (If your good at weaving in between projectiles in a shmup game, this should be cakewalk for you.)  About the most difficult thing is random invaders that will just start careening towards the ground in a straight line, which means instant death. The game can be finished in less than an hour, and under a half hour hence after.  But as many arcade gamers know, simply finishing the game isn’t the main point of a game like this, it’s getting a high score.  As tempting as it sounds to just use the powerups and shoot as many invaders as you can, that won’t cut it to get a high score.  After finishing the first stage (which was about 10 waves), even without dying, I got a rank of D.  The game  heavily rates you on how well you do with your combos, which means using the powerups all the time isn’t always a good idea, (but they do help to keep your chain combos high) because the powerups can easily shoot adjacent enemies that will break your color combo.  This doesn’t mean you should avoid the powerups all together though.  Holding down RB or LB will freeze the weapons timer, switching you back to your pea shooter for more accurate shots.  (Unfortunately you have to hold it down the entire time you don’t want to use it, so it can get a little confusing constantly letting it go just to shoot off your powerup for half a second.  Powerups only last about 5-6 seconds.)  So if you’re looking to get a high score by just shooting everything in sight, look somewhere else.  Ideally, use powerups to keep chain combos up but using your single shot to pick off certain invaders will keep your score going.

The game sports bonus rounds, caused by shooting certain UFO’s that appear depending on player’s actions.  The rounds give you a random target to kill a specific amount of within the time limit.  This ain’t always easy as often there are other random targets that get in the way.  Successfully finishing one of these rounds will upgrade your current weapon that can simply dominate multiple waves of invaders within seconds.  Your combo count is temporary disabled at hits time, so go crazy.  After about 10 waves, you will face a boss.  Each boss has their own weakness, which isn’t too hard to figure out.  But don’t spend too much time dilly dallying, because losing your lives forces you to restart at the beginning of the stage.

The game’s graphics keeps the player’s cannon, invaders and all projectiles simple to simple pixels, but everything else is changed.  The background is actually an audio visualizer, similar to programs like Windows Media Player or Winamp plugins .  The game’s soundtrack consists mostly of techno and trance riffs, and the main menu and boss music are remix versions of the simple “beep…beep…beep…beep” sound that the invaders made in  the original .  Following Lumines’ example, different things like bullets firing, the player moving, and invaders dying all produce different sound effects that  go in synch with the music, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself tapping your toes.  If you don’t like the audio though, you can turn music and sfx off separately, or just blast some other song over it.

Although the game says it comes with 11 stages, you will only see 5 of them in one setting.  After playing your first game (whether you finish it or not) you will unlock stage mode.  This is where you can see all the game’s stages and go straight to them, but only if you’ve been to it before in Arcade mode.  The stages branch out starting at Stage 3, 3-A, 3-B, etc.  How you get to these I haven’t figured out yet however, it’s not like I was prompted a choice.  And of course, there’s multi-player.  There’s “Survivor,”  in which 2-4 players compete online or locally.  Shooting UFO’s sends extra invaders to the other players’ screens, ala Tetris or other puzzle games.  Unfortuantely, this is played split screen, but it helps so you can look at other’s screens to predict when an attack will happen.  Given that this isn’t a FPS game however, your screen will always be the biggest with the other three on the side, so it’s not much of a big deal.  “Score Attack” has all players play on the same screen (you can move through other players) competing who can get the highest score.  “Co-op” is exactly as it sounds, play through the arcade mode with friends.  Lastly, there’s “Endless” mode, unlockable by playing through all the game’s stages.

Now because of all these updates to the game’s formula, to be honest it doesn’t feel like the original.  (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to preference.)  The original game was focused on eliminating the oncoming force of invaders before they hit the ground.  The closer they got to the bottom, the faster they would move, making the player nervous and know if he doesn’t react quickly he will die.  Well, the four bases are gone.  Powerups drop like no tomorrow, so while invaders will kill you when they do get to the bottom, they hardly ever do given the advanced weaponry.  (Save for those damn suicide bombers.)  However, being as I never really liked the original, this isn’t much as a problem for me, but it might be for you, depending on your tastes.

I was looking for a decent shmup game on XBLA, that didn’t have the difficult curve or game length of Ikagura, or just have one game mode.  While not exactly my favorite shump, the extra features made to update the gameplay to a more fast paced style of the original was well worth the 800 MS points.