With a heart full of napalm

Last month (or last year if you want to be dramatic), I rambled on about the sorry state of Nintendo’s digital distribution channel, the Wii Shop. In that short and hastily-typed tirade, I mentioned that though WiiWare’s lineup was lacking, I thought that Space Invaders Get Even looked like it had some chops. I was totally right.

I had bought some Wii Points a couple days ago so that I could download the newly-released Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (beautiful, beautiful game), and had 1500 points to spare. I figured that I wanted to give Space Invaders Get Even a shot, but World of Goo was calling my name. I believe it came down to the fact that for 500 points, if I didn’t like SIGE, it wouldn’t be a huge loss, whilst World of Goo would run me my whole 1500. So the Space Invaders got their chance to shine.

Space Invaders Get Even is a very simple game. A glorified shoot ’em up, even. The object is to fly your ship around the map and blow shit up. You would not believe that this alone is enough fun to warrant the 5 dollars it cost you to buy the game. Hell, this is more than enough fun to warrant a $20 purchase. I would totally not be disappointed if this were a disc release game and I’d bought it out of the $20 bargain bin at Superstore. But yeah, fly around and blow up some particular buildings and that’s all. The game is drenched in wonderful sci-fi cheese, and as far as the atmosphere of the game goes, makes me think back to War of the Monsters (anyone have a spare copy?) and Destroy All Humans.

But there is a little more to it than that! It’s a Space Invaders game after all, and the whole point of any title bearing that name would be achieving high scores. So while leveling the playing field (literally) is a great hook, you’ll get totally addicted to trying to top out your scores. Online leaderboards do nothing to help stop that addiction either. I’ve never been crazy about leaderboards (because I’m only mediocre at games), but for once I’ve been checking how I stack up to everyone else quite obsessively, and am proud to say I’m ranked 99th on overall game score. That’s pretty good!

There is one catch, however. The game you buy from the Wii Shop Channel only contains two levels and a boss. While these are more than good enough for a while, the itch to blow up some new scenery will rear its ugly head, and new scenery is available, thoughat a cost. There are three mission packs available for 500 points apiece. And while that sounds outrageous, there is an upside: each mission pack contains four stages and two bosses, thereby giving you twice as much game as your initial investment for the same price. Not as bad as it could be, but still a bit on the sketchy side. You really can’t expect much more from Square-Enix though. Also, the intial game eats up 300+ blocks of memory, and each expansion pack takes around 120, so it’s a friggin’ massive game to have on your Wii’s tiny internal memory. Until now I’ve barely cared about a Wii hard drive, but between SIGE and the Strong Bad games, I’m starting to get a little irritated by its lack of existence.

To conclude, I’d say that Space Invaders Get Even is a no-brainer. At least the intinal download is. Nickel-and-diming us for the rest of the levels is kind of a dick move, but it only comes out to $20 in the end, and like I said before, I would gladly pay that price for the game. I just really want to play War of the Monsters now. I never should have mentioned it… *sigh*