Indian Battle

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Taito

Well, this is definitely a game that hasn't aged well. This Taito game was only released in Japan as far as I can tell…I don't think this could have ever seen a release here in the United States without a lot of backlash. A lot of justifiable backlash, too. Indian Battle has you taking the role of, I assume, a frontiersman battling against a tribe of Native Americans. Your goal is to shoot them all as they scramble around the screen. Yes, the goal is to attempt to murder every Native American on screen. If that's not cringeworthy enough, the developers found it appropriate to play "Ten Little Indians" in the background while all the killing is going on. I'm not exactly Mr. Politically Correct, but the whole concept of this game is just very poor taste. If you're able to get past the awful premise of the game, though, this isn't an awful shooting game. Your targets are varied and many behave differently from each other, which keeps things interesting…but I simply had a hard time enjoying the so-so gameplay since I was cringing so much at the concept of the game as a whole. If this gameplay was applied to a different scenario, maybe I'd like it a bit more. For example, if this was a military strategy game or a game of another genre, I don't think it would bug me as much...or even if it was not a specific ethnicity of people that I was shooting at, just nameless bad guys...but firing on only a specific ethnic group of people...it just feels like its stepping over a line. As it is, I simply can't recommend Indian Battle due to its poor judgment in what to make this game about  Thankfully, the gameplay isn't something that I think most people would be too upset about missing out on anyway.

Review added: 11/12/2025

Invinco

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Sega

Invinco was another Space Invaders-inspired game, but this one was created by an up-and-coming player in the video game market, Sega. Invince, for the most part, plays exactly like Space Invaders, with enemies moving back and forth while slowly descending down towards the bottom of the screen, they've even got a UFO that flies at the top of the screen that you can shoot down for bonus points. The only real difference that I could see is that some enemies take more than one shot to take down, and certain enemies, when shot the second time actually explode and take out any surrounding ships near it. That's a neat addition to the game, but, unfortunately, it's not really enough to make Invinco stand out amongst the countless other games that took the gameplay of Space Invaders and tried to tweak it to make it better. Galaxian, for example, came out this same year and while it was clearly inspired by Space Invaders, it introduced major new gameplay features to make it stand out as its own game. Invinco, on the other hand, simply feels like a Space Invaders clone with very minor new ideas tossed in. Invinco isn't technically a bad game by any means, but when compared to other games that came out in 1979, including Galaxian, as I mentioned, Invinco simply doesn't stand out as being anything more than just another static shooter that takes place in outer space and that looks eerily similar to Tairo's hit arcade game that came out the year prior. 

Review added: 11/16/2025