Space Invaders: World Defense
Augmented reality gaming still doesn’t work
Space Invaders: World Defense is an augmented reality (AR) game where you shoot waves of aliens by pointing your phone at them in the real world. After each wave, you switch to an “Invader Dimension” where your ship flies on rails through a 3D wireframe landscape that’s meant to look like your neighbourhood but doesn’t.
…And that’s about it, which is fair enough because Space Invaders: World Defense, being totally free with no ads, is more of a tech demo or proof of concept than a complete game. The problem is that the concept it’s trying to prove – AR gaming – remains stubbornly unfun and annoying.
When you start the app, it locates you via GPS and notes your temperature and weather conditions, which supposedly influence gameplay but not in any manner I could detect. Since it’s a true AR game rather than simply location-based, it also requires a view of your nearby buildings. That’s why I had to go out on my street to play, waving my arms in the air like I just did care (that it was 2016 and Pokémon Go had just come out).
The game begins with a pixellated spaceship – your spaceship – flying over an AR feed from your phone’s camera. Cleverly, it gets you to turn in a circle to follow the spaceship, which I assume is how the Google ARCore technology more precisely locates your position and sets up a 3D mesh of your surroundings.
Once completed, an alien invader appears, its position indicated by an arrow above your ship if it isn’t in view. You auto-fire by dragging a finger across the screen, allowing for one-handed play, though my arm quickly tired to the point where I had to support it, Mulder and Scully-style:
Aliens appear one at a time around you, requiring you to turn to shoot them, though no walking is necessary. For me, the aliens were rarely occluded by real world buildings, and when they were it didn’t work properly – a couple of times an alien was half-embedded in a wall. The depth at which the aliens were projected into the world also seemed out of whack, with some going backwards “into” buildings; however, it was hard to tell whether this was really happening since the aliens also varied considerably in size (but not shape), sometimes appearing very close by through portals.
Some aliens have shields, meaning they take half a second longer to kill than others. Some have red spheres on their shoulders, of uncertain purpose. Some fire yellow cube bullets at you. And sometimes you collect power-ups, most of which seem to make no difference at all. There is basically no skill required other than being able to point your phone at bright colours.
After shooting aliens for a minute, you complete the wave and enter the Invaders’ Dimension for a non-AR treat. A black portal appears in the sky, quickly expanding to fill the entire screen with a 3D wireframe of your surroundings. This works perfectly on a skyscraper in their demo video. My street, however, was rendered as a barely recognisable blocky valley using data I expect came from Google Maps’ various aerial, satellite, and Street View sources.
My spaceship, previously stationary at the bottom of the screen, took off and flew on rails over the equally blocky neighbourhood toward groups of aliens. I found this slightly more interesting because there was now more than one alien at a time to shoot at; I also appreciated not having to hold my phone up. Sadly, after a minute I was returned to the real world, and the cycle repeated until I got hit by one yellow cube too many.
(It’s possible to play solely in the Invaders’ Dimension if you tell the app you’re indoors, but you might as well play literally any other game in those circumstances.)
Space Invaders: World Defense is not a good game. It is a good demonstration of AR gaming, however, in that it reminds us that no-one, with the dubious exception of Niantic’s various creature-collecting games, has created a convincing reason for people to put up with the physical discomfort and social awkwardness of pointing their phones at things in the real world that they aren’t photographing or filming. Even if every single technical issue in this game were fixed , even if the aliens were perfectly occluded by trees and cars and buildings, even if my phone were rendered entirely weightless, it still wouldn’t be fun.
It’s telling that the only AR game I’ve really enjoyed playing was released in 2010. In UFO on Tape, you try to keep a UFO in your camcorder’s viewfinder as it darts around; the longer it’s off the screen, the faster your battery drops. It wasn’t real AR because it didn’t display the real world on your phone at all, but it felt like AR because it combined your phone’s gyroscope with the aesthetics of amateur video to put you in another time and place entirely. Like every other game that makes you hold your phone up, it was only tolerable in small doses, but I loved it nonetheless.
A sequel, UFO on Tape: First Contact, was released in 2019, replacing the original’s charm and simplicity with fussy gameplay and garish art. It is worse in every way.
Housekeeping
Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring various different places to take this newsletter, with the hope of merging it with my blog, since I think Substack’s archives – or indeed, any newsletter service archives – aren’t ideal as a way to host them.
Ghost was briefly enticing, but it’s quite expensive and would mean all my blog comments would be wiped out. If I didn’t want to merge with my blog, I could revive my dormant Buttondown newsletter or try Beehiiv or similar services.
One option I’d dismissed long ago was using Wordpress. My blog is hosted on the paid wordpress.com service, which includes newsletters. When I tried it a few years ago, I didn’t like the look of the emails it created and was annoyed at how it dealt with multi-page blog posts. However, this week someone at WP helpfully pointed out these things had been improved, or at least made clearer.
I’m still not 100% set on merging my blog and newsletter: they have completely different names and purposes. Then again, over 95% of my long-form online writing is about games right now, and so maybe it’s time to recognise that.
Anyway: if you think it would be confusing to get newsletters from “mssv” (or maybe “mssv + Have You Played”), or to sometimes get emails about things other than games, please let me know!
In terms of getting a newsletter that's both Have You Played and blog - I figure it'd be mildly confusing, but far from unbearable or anything like that.