Face Invaders

Move your cannon and destroy five rows of animated faces before they reach your base. The formation descends and speeds up as faces are removed. Enemy fire wears away the four shelters, and a hit costs one of your four lives. A passing saucer gives a bonus. Clear every face to begin a faster wave.

The original is a one-line BASIC SYS launcher followed by about 2 KB of machine code; its rules, presentation and pace were reconstructed from that program and play in a Commodore 64 emulator. The ColecoVision version draws the formation of forty faces with tiles, so they stay stable on the console's video chip, with the bullets, cannon and saucer as sprites, and the whole playfield fits the screen.

Controls: either joystick. The stick moves the cannon and the button fires; a button starts the game and replays it after game over.

ColecoVision version by Amy Studio, written in Amy, the language by Amy Bienvenu. From RUN magazine's November/December 1992 ReRUN disk: original Commodore 64 machine-language program by Reiner Richter. This is a modern homebrew adaptation, not a commercial Coleco release.