Nintendo 3DS Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] Titan Attacks! (Puppygames, Nintendo 3DS, 2012)

For those who like neon purple and nuking aliens.

What a pleasant surprise, seeing this one on the list in hShop! I had Titan Attacks! on Steam as a teenager, and yes, I did 100% all the achievements because I was always a tryhard—but I had no idea this came out on 3DS! Puppygames provides the modern indie equivalent of 80s British home computer bedroom programmers taking arcade games and feeding them cigarettes and Pixy Stix. I remember them best for giving Robotron the upgradeable mech and bonus stages treatment with Ultratron, and Titan Attacks! does similar for Space Invaders.

In the time since I last played it, I've gotten to play through a proper, official take on updating Space Invaders, and it's interesting to compare the two. Motherships give powerups and make up occasional bonus stages like in the PS1 remake, but you also have various ways of making cash to upgrade your tank with additional hit points, more and faster guns, and smartbombs to deploy at will. While the promise of tons of firepower will call to you, you actually need all that money for shields as you approach the last of the 100 levels and have to tank the final boss' shotgun splooge directly to the face.

Back to cash. You earn money primarily through capturing alien POWs who drop out of ships or by making it through successive levels without getting hit. These two factors reward you for being accurate and discerning with the amount of firepower you let out, though by the end, it becomes pretty impossible to not just nuke everything and get nuked by everything. Aesthetically, I've always liked the neon scanlines pixels-come-alive style, and it's just got that visceral "it" factor that made me lose track of time after I installed it again on a lark. It's a shame it's their only game to come to the 3DS, because these guys do good work.