Space Invaders

Forty of them, one of you

The aliens are squat clay figures, four rows of ten, sliding sideways until they touch the wall and then dropping a notch closer. The maths is brutal and old: the fewer aliens are left, the faster the survivors move, so the last four are harder to hit than the first thirty combined.

Your ship sits under four violet shields that erode from both sides. Their bombs chew through them, and so do your own shots, which is the detail people always forget until they have accidentally demolished their own cover.

Scoring by row

The back row is worth the most at 40 a piece, then 30, 20 and 10 as you come forward. Clearing a full wave adds 200. Shooting from the back forwards scores better but leaves the fast low aliens alive longer, so there is a real decision in there rather than just aiming at whatever is closest.

Firing rate

There is a short cooldown between shots, deliberately. You cannot hold the button and spray. Timing a shot to land as an alien slides into the gap is how good runs happen, and it is why google space invaders still feels tense forty years after the arcade original.

Controls

Arrow keys move, space fires, and space also starts the game if nothing is running. The move buttons are hold to move rather than tap to nudge, which matters on a phone where you will be steering with a thumb on each side.

How far people usually get

Wave one is a warm up. Wave two is where the drop speed noticeably picks up. Most players lose their third ship somewhere on wave three or four, usually to a bomb they did not see because they were tracking an alien on the far side of the screen.

Elsewhere in the arcade

If shooting things is the appeal, google block breaker is the same clear the screen structure with a ball instead of a gun. google pac-man and google games snake are the two other proper games in this set, and zerg rush game is the one where the enemies come to you.

Everything is on the google easter eggs index.