Invasion Aliens

Invasion Aliens (full title Invasion of the Goofy Aliens, v1.0.1 by J. Zack) is a Mac shareware Space Invaders variant in which the player defends Earth from cartoon aliens armed only with a pea shooter. The aliens raid refrigerators, overfill bathtubs, and trash homes playing twister until the player snaps and starts shooting back.

Premise

The game opens with the aliens landing peacefully, which everyone thinks is pretty neat for about a week. They quickly turn out to be obnoxious houseguests, treating the planet like a giant playground. After enough days of trampled rooms and ransacked fridges, the player grabs a pea shooter and decides to chase the goofy invaders off Earth one wave at a time.

Gameplay

Mechanically Invasion of the Goofy Aliens hews to the Space Invaders template: a horizontal player ship at the bottom of the screen, descending formations of aliens, and a single forward-firing weapon. The cartoon framing and humorous backstory replace the original arcade game's somber cold-war tone.

Requirements and distribution

Runs on essentially any grayscale or 256-color Macintosh with 5 MB of RAM under System 6.0.4 or later, making it accessible to even very modest 68k machines. Freely distributable shareware so long as the Read Me file is included; the author also expressly permits CD-ROM redistribution. Verified clean with Disinfectant at release.

Version

This is the 1.0.1 update to Invasion of the Goofy Aliens 1.0, archived on Info-Mac under the games/arcade tree as invasion-aliens-101.hqx.