| Arcade games |
SPACE INVADERS
· Mystery ship trick - By counting your shots, hitting the UFO with every 23rd shot yields the maximum 300 points. Maximum numbers of UFOs for the first 3 screens are 8, 6, and 4.
· A different version of Space Invaders (with different graphics) apparently exists (pictures #1 and #2). The top-row invaders actually resemble the “monster” graphics on the machine! It’s believed that this version came from overseas either as an original release or a hack.
· Here is
the ordered UFO score table. It is a circular list, and the pointer moves every
time you fire:
100,050,050,100,150,100,100,050,300,100,100,100,050,150,100,050 {Eduardo
Mello}
· BUG: If an invader is firing at the exact moment it’s moving down to row 2, it runs into its own missile. The game detects this as a missile collision. On all other rows, this would get ignored, but it turns out that later in the code when the missile subroutine runs, the only thing that is checked for a collision with the player's ship is the height of the missile. It does not bother to check if the X position lines up. It assumes that if an invader's missile hits something this low, it must be the player ship. So therefore a ship is killed even though it was not hit. {Don Hodges}
· BUG: If you leave one of the “skull” invaders from the bottom-two rows as the last one to shoot, it will start leaving a trail of what sort of looks like exclamation points (see picture). This was later done intentionally (and expanded upon) in the sequel, Deluxe Space Invaders.
· RUMOR: On the fifth wave of invaders, the second mystery ship will deflect your shot with the rarely heard "deflection shot" sound f/x - a shot sound played backwards.
· RUMOR: Leave at least one of the bottom invaders (either the first or second) in each column. This means shooting around them to destroy the others above them. Nearly impossible, but it can be done. What happens is, if you destroy all but at least one of the bottom two row invaders in each column, the invaders stop marching. They become sitting ducks. You can then blast mystery saucers to your heart's content. Both SI and Deluxe SI have this trick. {Brian Deuel}
