Expect all the colours of the rainbow and all the fish in the sea to set their sights on your little turret. Reds and yellows and pinks and greens are welcome, one and all; Taito's celebration positively pokes fun at the limited palette of Nishikado's original. The visuals, otherwise, aren't much changed. There are portable particle effects aplenty and the PSP version sports some incredibly distracting FMV backgrounds, but the developers have wisely opted to retain much of the characteristic simplicity of the first game.
The war of the worlds is still being waged by the contents of a rock pool, but the flying fish army has come a long way since they first met us in battle; sporting lasers, duplicators and suicide bombers (I kid you not), it seems that the space invaders have spent the intervening decades investing heavily in weapons development, saving a little on the side to pimp their particular rides with spiffy new paint jobs and fuel injectors to enliven special occasions. They have a hundred new tricks up their tentacles, too. Some of the enemies rush your precious turret at crucial moments while others multiply and overwhelm you; some are so tiny as to be tough to hit, while a few are massively oversized, with bigger, badder armaments to boot. The sheer variety of enemies is staggering and in Extreme there's no place to hide, a revelatory design decision that might bring a certain snake to mind.
