YJL

ascii-invaders is a Space Invaders clone, the classic arcade and space shooter game, in animated ASCII art.

You control the laser cannon or gun ship, you fire at the alien’s ships to destroy them using Space and Arrows or J/K to move about, chasing or evading coming weapon fires. 3 lives to waste if you ain’t good at this like; or 2 lives too more, because you are a nerd, one is enough.

Beside three minions of alien ships, there is a big red one — mother ship? — which seems to only appear in very end, which gives you 50, 100, or 150 points if you can destroy it.

The animation of this clone is what makes it stand out, as you can see from upper-right, a compassion of the original and clone’s artworks. Or my favorite of all animation in this clone is when the cannon gets hit by alien’s weapon.

It requires a terminal size of 80x20 or larger, the bigger screen the more enemies, but the reward would be more points, that is if you don’t get shot.

Space Invaders is a game that was even born before me, but somehow I’ve never learned to like it, maybe ‘like’ isn’t the right way to put it. Just, it’s not my cup of tea. Needless to say, I have never played the original, if I recall correctly, since I only had Nintendo Famicom at the time, but I might have seen others playing at friend’s house.

It’s kind of nostalgic, but all my memory of that period time for video games isn’t that much, I seemed to play more of RPG games than other genres.

ascii-invaders was born in 2001, written by Thomas Munro in C with ncurses under the GPL2, currently git-88f530d (2013-08-06, post v0.1b (2002-07-21)).