One of the first arcade translations for the Atari home computers that Atari did was a version of Taito's arcade blockbuster Space Invaders. Although not exactly true to the original, Atari's verions of Space Invaders is a pretty good game in it's own right. The gameplay was silky smooth and much faster than the original. Atari's version was colorful with additional enhancements like a rocket graphic on the left side of the screen the invaders would come marching out of and a planetscape at the bottom of the screen for your cannon to traverse over.

The Invaders themselves bore little if any resembelance to their arcade counterparts but the most noticable omission was that the barricades are missing! How the heck could they have done that? Addiing insult to injury was that the lowely Atari 2600 version HAD them. Well, it still is a good game (I think the game plays very, very well) but hardly the 1:1 arcade translation everybody back then had hoped for. If want to play the real thing on an Atari computer then you must check out Deluxe Invaders by Rocklan which is basically a spot-on arcade port. All in all, I'd probably say this is a gem although a flawed one. This is my preferred version of Space Invaders on any platform and the missing barricades don't really bother me... they just get in my way anyhow.

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Copyright 1980 Atari Inc.
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