They only move one way. Down.
Arrows to move, space to fire. Your shields wear out. Every row you clear makes the rest come faster.
Shoot the edges first
Everyone opens fire on the middle of the formation because it’s directly overhead. Wrong instinct. Clear the outer columns and the block gets narrower, which means it takes longer to reach the wall and turn, which means it descends less often. You buy yourself real time.
The bottom row is the one that shoots at you. Killing from the bottom up reduces incoming fire immediately. Killing from the top down looks tidier and gets you hit.
Your shields are consumable
Four blocks between you and them, and they erode from both directions. Their shots chew through the top, your own shots chew through the bottom if you fire from underneath. Hiding behind a shield and shooting through it is how people accidentally destroy their own cover in about fifteen seconds.
Better plan: sit beside a shield, not under it. Step out, fire, step back.
They speed up as they thin out
Forty of them move slowly. Four of them move like they’re furious about it. The last two are harder than the first thirty combined, and everybody dies to them at least once while celebrating.
The mystery ship
Occasionally something crosses the top of the screen. It’s worth a lot and it doesn’t hang around. Firing at it costs you a shot you might need, which is the entire gamble.
Why this shape survived fifty years
Nothing about it is complicated. A row of things above you, one thing below, a gap that keeps shrinking. Google space invaders gets searched because people want three minutes of exactly that and nothing else.
Same shelf
Google block breaker is the other wall-of-blocks game, minus the return fire. Google pac-man if you’d rather be hunted. Zerg rush google flips it completely: they swarm you, and you click instead of shoot.
The rest of it is on google easter eggs.
