Alien Attack: Arcade Classic with an iPhone Twist

Defend Earth from attack by bitmapp Martians. Are you up to the task? If you remember Taito Corporation's classic Space Invaders then you're on your way.

Alien Attack is another piece of 80's nostalgia ported to the new millennium. However, Alien Attack builds on its arcade foundation by adding some new twists that take advantage of iPhone technology.

Rather than a simple set of left and right arrows, use the iPhone accelerometer to move your ship back and forth. Likewise, take advantage of touch-screen tech to blast away at the invading horde as they inch their way lower on the screen.

I really enjoy the hands-on approach of tilting and tapping to play Alien Attack. But sometimes, the controls responded slowly resulting in an untimely death. Using the left/right arrow option may have resulted in a more accurate, albeit less interactive, response time.

Alien Attack has many settings so that you can personalize your gameplay. The options are buried in the iPhone settings menu accessible from your home screen. Several apps go this route rather than having a dedicated info screen. However, I wish that the developer of Alien Attack included a message on the main screen explaining the location.

If you played the original then you owe it to yourself to relive the glory days of early video games. If you've never played Space Invaders, then this is your chance to see what the old fogies are talking about when they say "They just don't make games like they used to."

Editor's Note: Joel Rosenzweig, the app's developer, contacted AppCraver regarding our mention of issues with sluggishness. He offers this tip to improve gameplay across all apps. Thanks Joel!

I have run into this problem myself, only if the phone is synchronizing mail in the background.  This happens from time to time with every game I own.  The only way I have found to eliminate that problem is to simply disable the radio communications (including WiFi).  It appears that the radio communications stack runs at a high priority than the user threads.  If you disable the radio communications and still run into a slowdown, I'd really like to know about it.  So far, this has been the issue every time though.  I thought you'd like to know, because it will help make your game playing experience a little more enjoyable no matter which game you are playing.