The blog title refers to two new games I'm playing on PSP.

Blasting the Past: The first game, kinda new, kinda not, is Space Invaders Extreme, a 30th anniversary revisioning of the original spaceship game. I'm really surprised by how much fun Extreme actually is! I was never really a huge fan of the original. I would play it on occasion on the Atari 400 for a change of pace from Miner 2049er or Pengo, but I preferred Galaxian with its better graphics and sound and enemy dynamics. However Extreme pushes Space Invaders into overdrive, playing out dozens of imaginative variations on the original's otherwise monotonous theme. I find the resultant effect somewhere between the original Space Invaders and a prototype of a Gradius or R-Type with power-up weapons and bosses. Good stuff!

Changing Perspectives: The second game, all new, is Echochrome, the perspective puzzler that takes a cue from the artwork of Escher and the idea of impossible objects. This game has been growing on me steadily since I've downloaded it from the PSN and started acclimatizing myself to its unique world: purely stripped-down black-and-white graphics, classical music one might more readily expect to hear in the background at a fancy cocktail party than a budget download, terrain features determined by what the camera reveals and conceals (This is yet another game that ties into a previous entry on indirect control. In this game, you do not control the mannequin itself. You control the camera angle which changes the shape of the world to determine where the mannequin can and cannot walk on its own). At first striking me as better-in-idea-than-execution, the way the game actually works has won me over and I am fascinated with figuring out how to navigate the mannequin through each impossible world as efficiently and gracefully as possible. I'm curious to see how user-created levels will be made available in NA and the UK. Will they be free? Or will there be a fee?