Fueled by the fire of the second renaissance of the arcade classics, and on the fanfare of the franchise’s 30th anniversary, Space Invaders Extreme hits DS and PSP with a techno-flavoured, crystalline redux that should charm puzzle gamers, woo rhythm gamers, and enchant retro gamers. It’s a tour de force, but the PSP version harbors a dark scar gamers need to be aware of.

In my mind’s eye I can see them - kids in tight little shorts trying so hard to maneuver over barrels and up ladders, through mazes, down paths of precious Pac-dots, and yes, sliding left and right, deftly escaping alien missiles, saving the world. Alas, I did not ride that cannon. And I’ve never been able to understand how such a punishing game could ever really be fun; as you shoot Invaders, if you didn’t know, the wave picks up speed until the acceleration is obscured by the bottleneck of light reaching your eye. The gameplay in Extreme escapes the problem of being so abusive simply by spacing the waves out. Still lots of Invaders, but more waves. What this allows for is lots of tiny victories. It also allows for faster gameplay overall, which allows for a lot of other things that sets the game apart from the zombie horde of remakes.

There are several classes of Invader, and five colours for each class. Each colour corresponds to a powerup that drops if you can get a hit combo of four of the same colour. Each wave is organized carefully to present an interesting problem with multiple solutions based on the classes and colours positioned in the wave. There’s often a best solution for dealing with each wave. Some times you figure it out after the fact, as it’s often the case that the later waves will build off the themes of the previous, and the desire to start the stage over, getting closer to that perfect run, can be overwhelming. This is good and bad, depending on how you like to play games, but those who appreciate speed runs and high scores will transcend the thin illusion of progress and bathe in snooty completist glory.

The initial arcade mode experience can be completed in two to three hours by a normal human being, which is a little jarring, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s a tip-of-the-iceburg situation. Beating the normal game unlocks an extreme version which, aside from the stage bosses, is a whole new champaign, extra hard, but very interesting. Expert mode was clearly the escape for designers from creating watered down, entry-level waves; new, crazier classes of invaders start appearing, and if you can’t get better, hopefully you’re ok with beating the game the first time round’.

The iconic Invaders themselves have more or less retained their blocky nature, which is great. A lot of Space Invaders remakes fail to capture the spirit of the original because the original is so rife with cut corners, remembered nostalgically by Taito acolytes, and the Invaders are commonly the first to change. Most visual elements of Extreme pay tribute to the original, in fact, or at the very least the neo-retro movement as a whole. The background is a little overly psychedelic, which is a little distracting, but fits perfectly with the distracting techno soundtrack. It’s true that when Tomohiro Nishikado was designing the the first Invaders game he had to scrimp on the desired flare due to hardware limitations. The over-saturation is touching, in a way; this is, perhaps, a closer game to his original vision. If a little annoying. You can turn both the over-active background and the music off.

But It’s not all chipper tunes and sexy Invaders in this juicy cannon-shaped pleasure dome. An evil magic spell has been cast upon the multiplayer functionality of Extreme for the PSP, specifically. What the PSP did to deserve this curse isn’t clear, but it’s the only explanation acceptable to me for why a multi-media device like the PSP should lack infrastructure and ad-hoc download play that exists in the DS. It’s hard enough finding another human being with a PSP, let alone a PSP with the same game in his or her system. It’s tragic.

Tragic as it is, it’s hard to stay angry. Space Invaders Extreme is the ultimate reconstruction of a brutal arcade game, loaded with low-hanging fruit - fruit with little pictographs of a satisfaction beyond the mortal quench of plant life, beyond simply completing a wave, a stage, or the game itself. I feel like I can play this thing forever, always perfecting my score. This is the one’a those games that you’ll always bring with you.