Astro Invasion Brings 1979-Style Arcade Panic to Amstrad, Dragon and Tandy Computers

Tom Gun Software releases Astro Invasion, a pure machine-code shooter inspired by Stern's 1979 Astro Invader for Amstrad CPC, Dragon 32/64, and Tandy CoCo.

Tom Gun Software has released Astro Invasion, a new machine-code shooter that looks back to Stern's 1979 arcade game Astro Invader for inspiration while spreading the resulting alien emergency across an impressively broad collection of vintage computers. Versions are available for the Amstrad CPC range, Dragon 32, Dragon 64, Dragon by Tano and Tandy Color Computer family. The premise requires very little committee discussion: an alien mothership is deploying increasingly troublesome formations and your lone starfighter is expected to do something about it.

The interesting part lies in how the project accommodates hardware families with quite different capabilities. Amstrad CPC players receive a full-colour presentation, while the Dragon and Tandy editions use sharp monochrome visuals. Automatic keyboard mapping on Dragon and CoCo hardware also attempts to reduce the traditional home-computer ritual of spending the first five minutes determining which key somebody decided should fire. Astro Invasion isn't trying to disguise itself as a modern twin-stick shooter wearing pixel-art trousers. Its design deliberately embraces the pressure and immediacy of late-1970s arcade games, where enemy patterns, positioning and reactions matter more than upgrade trees and twelve-minute cinematics explaining why the aliens are upset. Multi-platform homebrew of this kind is particularly valuable because Dragon and Tandy machines receive considerably less new software attention than Commodore and Sinclair systems. The aliens, admirably, appear to discriminate against none of them.