Increase Speed, Drop Down, and Reverse Direction!

My previous post about the Space Invaders drink markers reminded me of the excellent episode of Futurama where the space invaders from the planet Nintendu 64 were attacking earth.  The segment, entitled "Raiders of the Lost Arcade", had numerous comical references to classic arcade games. By my count they referenced 17 classic video games:

Asteroids
Donkey Kong
Super Mario 64 (or at least a talking Mario in general and I think SM64 was the first one with that)
Battlezone
Missile Command
Defender
Moon Patrol
Doom
Pac-Man
Centipede
Space Invaders
Ms. Pac-Man
Berzerk
Robotron 2084 (maybe not, but not sure what else the big brain guy might be from. Thought for a minute maybe Space Fury but SF's big brain guy only has one eye)
Zero Wing (All your base are belong to us)
BurgerTime
Q-Bert

I'm guessing that most folks who might be reading this have already seen this Futurama before, but if you haven't then you need to rectify that situation post-haste.  Check out the video below - it's only about 6 minutes long.



And furthermore, while looking for this video I discovered a freeware game that a game developer named Shinobi had created based on the Space Invaders sequence in the episode. It has apparently been around since 2009 but I'd never seen it before, so I downloaded it and checked it out and I actually thought it was quite good. The graphics are nice and clean with some nifty parallax action and the gameplay includes some extras like double-shot and shield power ups and alien bomb hazards. Supposedly has some more surprises too but I don't think I played long enough into it to see everything. And the tie-in to the episode is done very well - Fry rolls in with his Rush tape blaring and the other characters make cameo appearances with clips from the show from time to time depending on the situation. So if you are a Futurama fan or a Space Invaders fan it is worth the download. You can grab it here:  http://www.shinobis-place.de/Page_neu/index.html. He also created several others I haven't tried yet - Moon Patrol, Asteroids, 2nd Encounter, Kung Fu Master 3D, Snake and Fish, and Run or Die.

Or if you'd prefer to just check out the gameplay on video instead here ya go: