#pre 1990

Family photos. Baby photos. Mostly on my father’s side.

Me, both Grandmas (Laura Joyce (DiMillio) and Ellen Farrell (Roche)). Joseph, Michael, Damion, Christopher, and me. My dad and Ellen. Ellen, Christopher, and Patrick (Grandpa). My dad and Uncle Richard.

03. Pre – 1990 Videogame – Space Invaders (Arcade)

  Positives/Gameplay Successes

+ Controls are extremely intuitive and responsive. 

+Difficulty curve is perfect. It does a good job of starting off slow and gradually getting faster as the player gets accustomed to the controls and enemies.

+ There’s a nice tension that rises as the game goes on. Enemies start spawning closer to the bottom of the screen, they start to move faster, and they also seem to fire more often. Overall, enemies get more aggressive as time goes on, forcing the player to adapt accordingly.

+ The mystery ship that flies across the top of the screen is a nice way for players to earn extra points if they can hit it. It’s a nice risk-reward situation since the player sometimes has to go out of his way to hit it.

Negatives/Gameplay Failures

-      There are not enough enemy types, which leads to gameplay becoming repetitive.

-     Overall, enemies are predictable. All enemies follow the exact same horizontal movement patterns throughout the whole game. With more movement variation, the player would be forced to stay on his toes more.

-     Enemies the player gets more points for destroying are not necessarily harder to destroy.

-     All enemies move at exactly the same speed at all times which can make the game feel mechanical. If enemies moved at different speeds from one another, the game would feel a lot more natural.

Thoughts

∼ The player can accidently destroy parts of his base, which can be a little frustrating at times, but it does add one more thing for the player to think about while playing.

∼ The ammo shot by all the different enemies seems to travel at similar speeds and do the same amount of damage. Again, they’re no differentiation between enemy types.

∼ The mystery ship has a different number of points associated with it every time, but seems to travel at the same speed each time. Maybe it would be better if the faster the ship is traveling, the more points the player gets for destroying it.

∼ Only enemies in the front of the formation seem to shoot. It would be interesting if enemies further back in the formation could shoot at the same time as well.

Would Likes/Fixes

° More weapon types. Using the same gun all the time can get boring after a while.

° Power-ups. There should be some kind of reward that the player can get from completing waves besides extra lives. This could make the player want to keep playing to see what kind of special items or abilities he could get.

° Boost mechanic. This could help the player more effectively get out of sticky situations and would help prolong playtime, which would increase tension as time passes.