Phalanx

A formation of aliens drifts left and right, dropping a row closer each time it touches the edge. Slide your cannon along the bottom and pick them off before the grid reaches you. The fewer aliens remain, the faster they move, so the final stragglers are the hardest.

• Fire one bullet at a time; you can't shoot again until your shot lands or leaves the screen.
• Clear the entire formation to advance; let it reach the bottom and the round ends.
• Higher difficulties pack tighter, faster, more aggressive grids.

• Desktop: Left/Right arrows or A/D to move, Space (or the FIRE button) to shoot, P to pause.
• Phone & tablet: on-screen move and fire buttons make it fully playable by touch.

• Thin the columns from the outside in so the formation can't slide as far before turning.
• Because only one shot is live at once, don't waste it, wait for a clean lane.
• Track the speed-up: save a wide gap so you can chase down the last fast aliens.

Phalanx revisits Space Invaders, released by Taito in 1978 and designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who had to build much of the hardware himself because nothing off the shelf could run it.

Its most famous feature was an accident. The machine could only draw the aliens so fast, so as you destroyed them the survivors moved quicker — a hardware limitation that turned out to be perfect escalation and was kept deliberately by everyone who copied it. The four shields erode from both sides, yours as much as theirs, so hiding behind one slowly removes the cover you are relying on. It is often credited with starting the arcade boom outright.

Phalanx is an original take on the golden-age fixed-screen shooter genre, built in-house and free to play in your browser, no downloads, no installs.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.