Playing to Infinity: Space Invaders Infinity Gene
I've been replaying Space Invaders Infinity Gene more than any other game on my iPod.
Although it shares a name with that archaic arcade game in which you whittle down alien rows with a cannon, Infinity Gene turns out to be a Japanese-style "bullet-hell" shooter in the vein of DoDonPachi or Ikaruga. You move all over the screen, weaving through dense, interlocking patterns of bullets and triggering many large explosions.
Infinity Gene is a far cry from both Space Invaders and the bulk of what sells on the App Store -- puzzlers, tower defense, click-fests and time-wasters. It's a bid for an older style of gameplay in which, rather than letting your closest compulsions lead you on (as in match-three or find-the-hidden-object or spell-a-word-out-of-these-blocks!), you test your nerve against increasingly, blatantly steep odds, like a hero or a masochist.
But there is an important difference between Infinity Gene and most other shoot-'em-ups ("shmups"). While traditional shmups opt for sensory overload, filling the screen with lush backgrounds, colorful blasts and vivid enemies -- almost to the point of being grotesque, like the too-expressionistic strokes of a Willem de Kooning painting -- Infinity Gene pares away the excess and leaves only skeletal outlines of ships and bullet patterns.
Like mathematical symbols, the game's arcing lines, squiggles and concentric explosions look abstract, pure, and analytical. They're an ideal accompaniment to the Music mode, which derives a completely unique level from any song in your music library. The action isn't matched to the beat of the song, as in Audiosurf; instead, the level appears to be generated from the iTunes metadata. There is no logical relation between what you play and what you hear. What is brilliant about the Music mode is that it doesn't even matter. You make connections anyway.
At the same time, you're in a constant tug of war with the game, which is how I believe it should be. Infinity Gene takes up my time in a fundamentally different way than the likes of Bejeweled, which seems to posit that human beings are no different from amoebas: unthinking, purely reactive. The latter nullifies the passage of time like a black hole, making you feel that the world around you has come to a standstill. The former plays with time. It distorts it; stretches it out and winds it up tightly and pulls you along with it. It does so, like any shmup, with sublime outbursts of bullet hell alternating with relative patches of calm. In short, it's like a piece of music -- varying rhythm, tempo and structure to affect your feeling of space and time.
Music mode makes the game's relationship with music explicit. I tried out the following songs -- among many others -- and found that each shed new light on my experience of the game.
The Velvet Underground, "What Goes On"
The guitar is the driving force in this song, and it happens to be in rhythm with the crisscrossing blue lines in this level. Set to the game's own techno soundtrack in the story mode, the lines resembled background noise, and I ignored them. Set to this song, they look like a vast landscape above which I am traveling at the speed of sound.
Explosions of alien ships occasionally harmonize with Lou Reed's singing, as if he were singing about me ("I'm goin' up, and I'm goin' down / I'm gonna fly from side to side"). And when the song turns time into molasses, dissolving into a woozy, blurred guitar solo, the game miraculously does the same -- filling the screen with dozens and dozens of bullets that I have to dodge one-by-one. Space Invaders becomes romantic. I'm on a mission to save the earth.
Xanopticon, "Drunxpla"
The nervous, insect-like beats in this song threaten to flood the level and overtake the game itself. The game follows suit by tossing enemy ship after ship at me. I dispatch them one after the other -- feeling like I'm in the eye of a storm -- and start to hate them. The ships and gunfire, threatening to crowd me out of the game, look like pests.
My drive to get all the way through the stage multiplies, but I run out of lives. When I die, the tinny bleep of my exploding ship is buried amidst the music. My role in the game seems insignificant compared to everything that Infinity Gene can throw at me. Death, and rebirth, are simple facts of life in the game. I realize that wanting to keep playing means literally fighting for survival inside the game, struggling to last. Unlike most other games on the platform, Infinity Gene doesn't try to seduce me. It doesn't want to take any more of my time than I want to give it. Instead, this game earns its place by responding, with all its energy, solely to the effort that I put in.
William Byrd, "Sellinger's Round" (played by Glenn Gould)
This is also a piece of dance music, one from medieval times. But I never understood exactly how it worked until I played Infinity Gene to it. Enemy ships enter the space and fan out, as if acknowledging my presence. I engage each one in a sort of dance, changing partners when I off one.
The piano music leaves me with ample space to contemplate the game. The enemy onslaught has a distinct rhythm; ships enter and leave, arcing through the screen while my own ship flies relentlessly upward, with the coursing background serving as a calm counterpoint to the action on-screen. The game looks like a series of milestones, or bullet points, on a timeline that keeps moving forward. Even as I'm immersed in the game, I am fully aware of the time that is passing, and by extension, the world around me. That's a first for me and a videogame.
Glomag, "DaMaGe"
Chiptunes fit Infinity Gene to a tee. It may be obvious, but I'm still blown away when the game puts together a quintessentially arcade-like level. There are now winding paths that I have to safely fly through, gates that block my path and open at the last minute (one gate is directly behind a floating platform -- typically cheap death!). With an 8-bit soundtrack, blasting ships once again feels like a timeless activity.
If chiptunes like this are meant to make you feel as if you're dancing inside a videogame, then actually dancing inside a videogame seems to amplify the effect. Every sight and sound is in its right place; everything matches up.
Glomag's song reminds me that videogames are their own medium, that they can meaningfully reflect on their own past with inventive and surprising remakes like Space Invaders Infinity Gene without necessarily having to relate to other mediums. On the other hand, Infinity Gene's Music mode suggests that the more our media mix -- with games drawing songs from iPods, or movie collections sitting next to game collections on Xbox Dashboards -- the more we can be enriched by the associations that come forth.
Games take our time and hold it in a tight embrace. It's the way we interface with them (totally, tenderly, tragically). So it's fitting that they should now begin to interface with other things in our lives, too. Infinity Gene, not simply a game but a lattice that you can overlay with your music, is a reminder that machines can make meaning all on their own.
Get the first hour in Kyle Orland's Games for Lunch: Space Invaders Infinity Gene.
Check out more Crispy Gamer features:
