I need to talk about Chicken Invaders

Hello. This will not be an easy (dare I say, it will be boring) lecture to read (mostly due to my writing), but I feel the need to state some (maybe obvious) things and share my thoughts.

1. Chicken Invaders Origins
Chicken Invaders started as a parody to a Space Invaders. Some can say that it was an inspiration, but I personally see it as a parody and there are people that also think this way. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great. Because it was great. I mean, it was better than space invaders. You had weapon upgrades, you had more waves, you had boss fight, more advanced color palette, better sounds. Just everything better, but the decision to name it “Chicken Invaders” for me is the reason why Chicken Invaders isn’t extremely successful. People will always associate it with space invaders parody clone.

2. Mystery of music, free marketing and people
Chicken Invaders 2 may be the part that had the most impact on whole series. And I’m not talking about new graphics, removing the only horizontal movement or even full campaign with bossess, over 100 waves, 3 weapons, bonus points, cutscenes etc. I’m talking about the demo versions. Let’s make an experiment. How many people have heard of Chicken Invaders through demo released like Fricking everywhere. I’ve had a lot of cd games, many from magazines which were extremely popular and they always had some demo versions of games. And you know what was on most of them? Yes, Chicken Invaders 2 demo (either normal edition or x-mas edition) (also this obsession with CI2 demo was maybe just in Poland idk). So here’s a small poll:

What was your first contact with Chicken Invaders series?

  • Chicken Invaders 2 demo (normal or x-mas)
  • Chicken Invaders 2 (normal or x-mas)
  • Literally anything else

0 voters

I’ll tell you something really disturbing for me. I personally know few people that aren’t hardcore gamers (they even shouldn’t be described as gamers because some of them don’t even game anything anymore and only played for few minutes) and they heard of Chicken Invaders. One person told me that she remembers it because the demo version was installed on school computers. I even made my mom play Chicken Invaders and she loved it (Yes, she hated Chicken Multiplicity in CI4, she said that it’s “okropnie denerwujące”).
Long story short. Chicken Invaders is recognizable even to people that you don’t expect them to know it.

You know for what I remember CI2 most? (not speaking of sentiment and good memories). The music. Soundtrack ties it all. It’s not the main point of the game, but it’s a way to remember the game. We will speak about it more in CIU section.

Another thing to add before ending this really long section is local co-op. It was really good game to play when you had guests and wanted to have fun. You could steal someone presents, watch each other fails or just be great duo on a mission to kill all the chickens. For me it’s one of the strongest advantages of this series.

3. The part that wouldn’t be released if CI was made by Valve
Chicken Invaders 3 had something that made CI2 look bad and stupid. I’m speaking of cutscenes. Cutscenes that now tie in with a story that is a new addition to this series (you can argue that CI2 also had a story - our hero needs to defeat the chickens but it’s not even a story, more like a requirement to finish the game). The story wasn’t a masterpiece to make it a indie hit, but at the time I played it the cutscenes were funny to me and some of them still are (pizza delivery scene to Yolk is the best). I even used to draw it on my laptop in paint (sorry Davoid, the pictures are on a broken laptop HDD that I didn’t have time and money to recover it from). So yeah, we should remember CI3 because it gave us story for this games and also some great weapons (especially intro sequence with us fighting a chicken with lightning fryer, it showed it as a powerful weapon and you wanted to use it)

4. The villain of the series
This was mainly a good part, because it introduced:

  • new worlds (retro world, supernova world, feathers (but steel is heavier) world and Space burger world)
  • new things called satellites which I immediately started to hate because they make the game easier and game even rewards you for not using them so I just didn’t care about them.
  • rotations of spaceship which would later become a big problem to me as seen here - Control over spaceship rotations
  • helping spaceship Hen Solo (which was never ever used again)

However it introduced something vile and evil and horrible. Keys. What the chicken was wrong with CI3 unlocks? Why introduce this grind mechanic to something that many describe as game for casual players? This was the biggest disadvantage of this game, but the worst part is that it made a return in every game to this day.

I also have some memories of it, mostly playing it with my mom and one that involved watching credits and spotting polish name here which I would comment with “Oh look, it’s a polish name. I wonder if there are polish people working on CI5”. This young version of me had literally no clue that he will be a CI5 beta tester. There was also after credits scene that I personally thought was a teaser of 5th part, but it just become a joke scene so yeah, Chicken Invaders is not MCU.

5. The part that started my obsession with Steam
tl;dr I was in beta team and made an account on steam as soon as I heard that you can buy a Chicken Invaders from IA site and get a steam key for free. That was 5 years ago. Time sure flies.

But what exactly did CI5 bring?

  • Some new weapons (popcorn gun , machine gun)
  • Planet missions (fan-freaking-tastic!). If not for a stupid autoscroll on caverns and just generally slower gameplay it would be my most favourite waves ever added. Still hope that we can see it in CIU (Planetary missions generator)
  • spaceship customization. You could make your spaceship well… more yours. It was a big deal. At least for a single player because on local co-op you would still fly the same spaceship.

Overall I really like this game, but there are some less great things to state:

  • there were no new satellites added (not that I would use them, but something fresh should come)
  • the story is the most stupid thing in the whole series. Like even CI2 had better story without having it
  • credits are exceptionally long and boring. It’s just a long star wars autoscroll with every single name on different line. It could easily fit together and it would even make sense because people are under the same category “QA”
  • yet more things to buy with keys. Here I noticed something that was available in every game from CI3. As I had bought CI5 from IA site I got access to all editions and to my surprise on Halloween edition I had to start collecting keys from 0 again. Apparently every edition starting from CI3 (because it’s the first game with unlockables mechanic) had it’s own saves and it doesn’t just act as a retextures. Which is something that made me even angry because why would you want to grind on every edition separately. Good way of solving this would be to make a global profile that all editions of the same part can access and a player can continue to collect keys (the most ideal way of solving it would be to get rid of dumb keys).
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Everything wrong with Chicken Invaders Universe in few words or more

Finally we’re over the preface part and we can get to my main words of concern and how CIU is not going to be my friend.
You see CIU was something that I didn’t expect so soon. I thought that IA would first finish all of the editions because I even noticed a pattern that “Chicken Invaders X - X special editons” and it so far works. I saw the first teaser and was just happy because new game is better that different textures right? But then I learnt that it will be a MMO. So there was a first minus.

List of CIU sins so far (some of them are not yet here, but were talked about some time ago):

1. in-app purchases
It’s a big no no. Just no and no. Of course our loved keys also make a comeback, but here in most evil form. After release it was said that you will be able to buy keys for real money. But the store has mostly cosmetic items right? No, in this spin-off it actually has even more uses for keys that aren’t cosmetic - lives, satellites, special weapons, weapons, power levels, spaceships, spaceship upgrades. Power level alone can make it pay-to-win.

2. Use of existing bosses
Not so long ago CIU had only existing bosses that regular CI players knew about. There are 2 things that CIU makes wrong.

  • It makes bosses less special. Before you only could fight final bosses at the final wave of a Chicken Invaders game. In CIU the same bosses can be fought at wave number 10.
  • It makes older games bosses look lame. Look at Unidentified.Chicken.Objects, they feel great in CIU (I think that sometimes they go too low, but people don’t care about it) and if you go back to CI3 after killing U.C.O in CIU you will find that they are too easy and boring.

3. Using old music
This may be only wrong to me, because I personally associate a lot of things with music. Like really a lot of things. Events, failures, games, people. And here comes CIU using music from older games. It’s just like it crushes my memories which I can say are positive with every older part of the series. Using the same music for something different makes it also less special with original thing. It can still be solved by preparing new music specifically made for CIU. The worst thing about it are boss fight themes. Especially final boss themes. Final wave in older games was meant to be epic - after destroying 119 waves you have a difficult boss fight and epic music that pumps you to do your best. And this way you associated your hard work with music.

4. Waves
There’s a lot of waves in CIU. I think that it will be near 400 after release (that’s if we assume that CIU will get at least 100 waves from every Chicken Invaders Part. Now that creates a problem. Why would gamers pick older parts if in CIU there’s more variety and more content? Once again CIU makes older games look bad.

5. Main goal (or rather lack of it)

  • If you’re a single player gamer (like me) there are no things that you can set as a goal here. There’s no purpose to play this game. You can only play it to break your record and it’s not so satisfying like in other mobile games. Let’s take a look at… idk, maybe “don’t touch the spikes” (I played it few years ago so I’m not sure it still works like that, but it was pretty basic so they should keep it). So in DTTS you control little bird using your fingers by tapping your screen. The game is endless so you can technically play forever, but obviously the difficulty changes based on how many points you have at the time. It’s not a big score like in Chicken Invaders. In fact it’s just 1 point for touching the wall. And trust me it makes breaking your record even by 1 feel special. Also it notifies you about it with special sound and a text “new record”. There are also in-app purchases here, but only used for cosmetic items like bird skins and you can earn it by playing the game. The more points you have the more game currency you can get if you catch the special “sweets”. Long story short, CIU doesn’t make breaking your record special. In fact if you beat the level you’re probably never return back to it because why would you want to return to something you won and breaking your record isn’t satisfying.
  • Speaking of not satisfying. Exploration. CIU exploration reminds me of big open world games where you can’t do anything special, but “hey at least it’s bigger than other games!”. There are black-holes, but how can normal casual player know about their location or even that they exist? You can count for that player statistics, but the proper tutorial would be much better at this situation. Also exploring the whole galaxy to get rare items is not worth it because these stats hardly do anything that you need in gameplay. First versions of the game had interesting new mechanic about controling your spaceship, but due to outcry of some people it was totally scrapped and here we are with stats that don’t mean anything. The best thing about exploration is finding planet that have great missions which you aren’t annoyed of. Planets also have useless stats, chicken god knows what for. Maybe they could affect the gameplay? Temperature could change the speed at which our weapons overheat, mass could change control of our spaceship because it could be constantly pulled in the direction of the planet.
  • Medals. Yeah, you can set your goal to earn all medals, but you can get them more than once. Maybe CIU should have achievements that you can only earn once in the profile and it would act as a way to check how much of the game you completed or how much you still need to do. Medals don’t feel like that for me.
  • Maybe we can have some challenges in the game. Like to earn a new game difficulty skill you need to beat a specially made challenge with levels not picked as random. So you can earn all the difficulties for free and you can have something to set a goal (beating all challenges). Also the final challenge that needs to be made using the most difficult skill level should give some reward that you can use, maybe special spaceship?

6. Multiplayer?
Yeah, CIU is described as MMO. But does it deserve to be called multiplayer? We need online multiplayer or local multiplayer. You can only see other players spaceship in galaxy (sometimes even you get to see them flying from one planet to another) and challenges top 10. I know it’s difficult to add, but it needs to be added in such a game.

I can’t remember anything else that I wanted to add to this list, but I feel like it was bigger in my mind. So let’s get to the last part.

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How CIU set the bars for next part of Chicken Invaders too high.

Okay, here’s the long waited end of my bad writing, but I need to point that even if CIU is right now bad for me, it has it’s good things. However this means that the next part of the series needs to be even better and this will be difficult task. So here’s the list of things that next part needs to consider.

1. End of 120 waves campaign
This may sound like a heresy, but the next part shouldn’t have the standard 120 waves campaign. I already wrote about the reason why - if CIU has more waves why would gamers pick something with less options. However we don’t need to have a game with linear 500 waves campaign. That would be overkill and probably would be boring, but notice the word “linear”. We can have more waves, but we shouldn’t make it into a typical one mission campaign. And this brings us to…

2. Introduction of exploration
Yes. We need to have exploration in the next part. This way we can use CIU mechanic and make it much better. Just imagine, you start the game and you have a look at a big galaxy and you can choose how you complete the game. For example you need to travel to part where the next big point of the story is (maybe some artifact? /joke) and you can choose which path to fly - the longer with less difficulty or the shorter with more difficulty. There could also be side missions where after completing much harder challenge you are rewarded with a new special weapon or spaceship part that makes you stronger or let’s you fly faster. The possibilites are endless. This could also open the possibility of speedrunning the game on 2 categories “any% speedrun” and “100% speedrun”.

3. New game engine?
It’s not exactly CIU fault because it still uses the same graphics as CI4 or CI5 (or at least it looks like it), but I feel like we reached the point where the game engine is kind of lacking. It can’t handle explosions well, “it’s optimized for 2D sprites” so you need to create every single frame alone which means that the animations have fixed number of fps and it could look weird on higher Hz monitors (like right now on normal 60Hz screen I can see how the frame changes when the chicken follows my movements with head), it’s not friendly with modding (single player games can be modded how you want because it doesn’t affect other people), it doesn’t support blurring. I can’t find any info about sounds, but maybe 7.1 surround sound would be possible? Also DirectX 9 doesn’t give much control over GPU plus it’s exclusive to windows. And definitely don’t use DX12. It may be much better than other DirectXs but it’s exclusive to only one OS. Use Vulkan. It has many advantages over this joke of exclusivity.

4. Spaceship upgrades
Nothing to describe much. Not only next part needs to have a upgradable parts it also needs to have a better impact on gameplay than here in CIU.

I’m open for discussion. If you see that I wrote something bad (and I’m not speaking of typos) please point it.

6 Likes

Wow. I’m impressed actually. I really don’t have to point out here, but i want to talk about point 1 and 2. It seems we started our adventure with Chicken Invaders in almost exact same way. Although my first CI game was CI1, i really loved it and i was curious if there’s any continuation. So, one day I went to shop and a found an Polish PC magazine called (Komputer Świat Gry) with full version of CI2 in polish language on CD. Sadly, this version didn’t had cheats, online high score tables, but some time later my uncle had CI2 aswell but we bought it from iA website. I was really excited to test cheats. It was also my first experience with christmas edition. I also played this game with my siblings and parents lol my younger bro always said that this game is “strasznie trudna”
Music was also amazing. When I heard Just to Funk for the first time. I started dancing. Really. That was 5 year old me lol
I know this answers none of your opinions, but I just wanted my story with Chicken Invaders aswell.

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I think, it’s good if cheats are allowed with consequences that mission outcome won’t be counted in any stats and you will get “cheating” medal. Just for fun.

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Same here

;_;

I also really disliked this feature. It’s like the PvZ Zen Garden, made for you to come back day and day.

Sameeeeeeeeeeeeee

Depending on implementaion it can be a total grind and almost forcing you to buy (Price changes) or make it so it’s almost unnecesary. Although there is an eventual plateu where all players will have the best equipment, it could be a while and people could buy stuff. But I can’t think of a good alternative.

I myself don’t see this as a problem but can see how to you and others it can

SSH. It’s SSH that doesn’t just buff HP but projectile speed etc.

I agree but disagree. Music is a connection to many things, definetly. But it should still be an option for those who want it. I guess you could just put up the soundtrack in the background and have game music muted.
And yeah, this doesn’t excuse CIU from not having much new music.

How? They’re older. You can’t change them. If we didn’t make new games that didn’t iterate on the old, what would we get? The new Mario games make the old ones look puny in comparison. Are the old ones bad? I don’t think so.
And content recycling is mostly a good thing I think.

Agreed

Yeah…

Special tailored challanges is something I could definetly look forward too. However they shouldn’t give gameplay altering rewards, maybe medals, new spaceship type (same stats like the best one) or a challange ship with very weak stats.

Yeah

I don’t find this lacking in my games. But for those who like it it’s a loss, ye

Does it? Why? It doesn’t need 'em if the gameplay is good and has something better to offer rather than part upgrades.

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Atleast the Zen Garden had calm music and was actually fun (for me)

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Delete that, please!

Why delete it? It’s his opinion.
We already have 1 time medals and I think we can have just more of them and not resort to achievements, but again, it’s his opinion.

About the

CIU is supposed to dominate the other games and actually the skill levels like Veteran, SSH, ect. actually works here, instead of stupid hp boosting.

After some thinking. I agree with that. Cheating in CIU could act like a training mode. You find a mission and want to test it or improve your skills so you turn the cheats on and you don’t get anything from that mission. Also medal for cheating isn’t good idea.

Exactly my point. Here SSH is well made so when comparing it with older “more HP” SSH, it’s better in CIU. So it makes the older games worse.

Yeah, I agree. We have a shop for that and I don’t use it so I don’t give a damn if there are songs from other games if I’m not going to hear them when I play.

But you totally can change them. It’s called update. In fact there are old games that are getting difficulty updates that make the games better to play for more advanced players. For example Terraria with 1.3 update expert mode. Or Hollow Knight with Lifeblood update.

Depends on personal view I guess. For me the newer just have too much staff and old ones are still better to play. (not counting mario maker 1&2, I would love to play them). Also every game is a new part and new bosses. Well you have Bowser returning, but this Bowser has more age and it makes sense that he has better or remade attacks. Here in CIU you have exactly the same boss from the same game, but with better attacks.

Why not? Look at CI3. If you completed campaign at veteran level you unlocked “gameplay altering” reward - new SSH difficulty skill. This way you could unlock all of the difficulties just by playing the game and not by buying them for keys.

It’s still possible for that to exist with challenges that give you skill levels. We can have both.

To be fair I only added blurring to the list of problems because of this: "Ring" environment effect - #12 by InterAction_studios. IA directly said it and I don’t know if you could make something interesting with blurring, but still it’s not available so we won’t know.

I personally love upgrades because it makes me feel more powerful and also makes me feel that I keep on advancing in the game. I added parts upgrade to the list because CIU has parts and we could use that if it will be made well.

Why? For me the medals are more like statistics because you can see how you played because of them. Achievements should be more of signaling that you made something, “achieved” something. If you achieve something more than once it makes the experience less unique. It makes it a normal element of your play.

I don’t know what’s the reason CIU exists, but dominating the other games doesn’t feel like CIU purpose.

And that’s exactly what I meant. Older games are looking worse when you compare them by difficulty levels, because older games have only “more HP difficulty” which is so extremely lazy.

Chicken Multiplicity is my mom’s favourite.

The previous Chicken Invaders games might be too easy because it is meant to be played casually (besides the keys feature which makes it grindy).

Then most of us want it to be an esports game.

There is a “Scrooge McChick Certification” medal for amassing 100,000 keys and InterAction Studios did say that you will be able to purchase keys in-game in the Plan Update #01 :

With the 100,000 keys medal added into the game, I hope InterAction Studios will change their mind when the game is fully released, and make one-time permanent IAP instead:

The IAPs always heavily affect the rating of every game, positive or negative so this is very important.

I also want to add one more: the always-online requirement.

For the local multiplayer or online multiplayer, InterAction Studios already says that it is a huge undertaking and cannot be easily done within the first year of release. But will there at least be an option to download missions (from your favorites or the mission results screen) to play offline, or better, download all missions in the entire galaxy? For example, play missions offline, your results will be saved but your stats displayed to other players will not be updated until you go online.

Going back to my mario point.

An update also changes the whole expierience. We aren’t iterating on the same constantly like Terraria or Hollow Knight. That’s like they made Terraria 2 and then tried to make Terraria 1 as good as Terraria 2. Kinda pointless since you have Terraria 2? They’re not supposed to be the same.
And again, what if someone wanted to play the same way they did back in the day the old games? They’re there for that, and we got a iterative game CIU like terraria, where it will constantly be better. If we changed the old, we would lose them. I can only agree on the point to have an additional update to the games to implement the new SSH mechanics. But they shouldn’t replace the old ones.
What if you wanted to play the original mario bros. for nostalgia, speedruning or for plain old old school fun? You can’t, because they changed it to the newer version. Why? We got a new game just for that.

So? This game also is less casual than the previous ones, should we alter the old expierience? We got CIU just for the new bosses, and if you want to play with old bosses you have the episodes. What’s the point? Because they look bad in comparison? Again, I don’t think so, and probably a matter of opinion.

I’m up for items, skills, ship etc. just not something exlusive to challanges that would give you an advantage over other players period. Like a ship that dealt 10% more damage and had the stats of the best one. I wouldn’t want that.

I was thinking more motion blur and less actual useful blur. I agree, this is a engine limitation that is a limitation. Like all limitations. Limitation. That’s a word.

You know there can be one time medals that could basically act like achievements, right? Like the explore entire galaxy one? Ohhhh Waaaait. Right. No I gotcha. Alright sorry, achievements could be nice.

I still think they should be kept for preservation purposes. Again, at most, an additional gamemode with new difficulty. At most.

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Obviously,the developers will create a new game in hopes that it will be worse than older ones.
.
.
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Ciu might make the older ci games look worse(duh,why would they create a new game? So that it would be worse than older games,and so that no one would play it?),but does it really make them look bad? I’d disagree. I’d say why,but I think that Davoid already covered that.

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You jeſt, but it does ring true when you think about many companies, eſpecially the bigger ones.

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Oh yeah we need to update all games to look like CI1 and behave like CI1 very good idea

https://forum.chickeninvaders.com/t/chicken-invaders-memes/1626/129

obraz

Mario games don’t use older bosses.

I wouldn’t call “more HP SSH” good experience. Sure someone can have good memory with it, but update would just make the bosses fight better so no one should have a problem with that.

We are “iterating” on the same bosses. And yeah, no constantly, but after release of CIU it’s less likely that bosses here will have another rework so just one update of bosses in older games will make them the same.

Dumb explanation. Terraria 2 would be a sequel or prequel so it would have new bosses. It would be like making spin-off Terraria game that consists of boss fights from Terraria 1 and Terraria 2 and making some changes in bosses which are good, community loves them, but the old games don’t have the bosses updated

So you want to have two SSH difficulties?

Once again. Mario games don’t feature bosses that appeared in older games (we’re not counting mario maker 1&2 because they are strictly made about using the older games).

Guess why it’s less casual. Because it has better bosses which on higher difficulties have better attacks and more speed. Yes we should alter the old experience if it sucks. And SSH in older games sucks. It was always just more HP (and more points for new lives) here it is finally solved so why can’t we use that?

Exactly the point. Imagine this ridiculous situation which I believe is ultimately what IA wants the CIU to do: new player who had totally no clue about any of the chicken invaders games plays the Chicken Invaders Universe and falls in love with it. Because of that he/she proceeds to buy one of older games. Unblocks the SSH difficulty because it’s the difficulty at which he/she played and had the most fun and plays the game only to be disappointed that in older games bosses are just bullet sponge joke. BAM, you have one fan less and also a disappointed customer who may have want the refund and never returns to the franchise.

Can you make up your mind?

Harder difficulty level isn’t exactly giving you advantage over other players. It can make you earn more keys, but it comes with a harder gameplay price.

In CIU I agree, but in new episode of Chicken Invaders it could work.

Eww, who would want motion blur.

It still don’t find it this way. Medal for exploring the galaxy should exactly be the achievement. Other medals are shown at the end of every mission so you can know how good you played it and they act like a statistics.

We can just update SSH difficulty and keep the lower difficulties the same.

Maybe not in hopes, but as already Traveller stated it happens often.

Yes, yes it does.

Normally game developers make a new game to make a better game, but they also don’t use the existing enemies. If some of them are returning then it’s either prequel or sequel so it makes sense that they are kind of different because they are evolving. CIU just uses the same bosses from the same point in time and makes them better. I see no reasons why we can’t have the better bosses in older games if we know how to make them better.