Unfaithful to Space Invaders. You should be able to shoot their bullets out of the sky and if any of the hamsters touch the ground it should be Game Over and when only one is left it should move at crazy speeds all over the screen like a yorkie on crystal meth.
Some of my best child memories are playing space invaders (beating my father at highscores; later rounds you have to very fast especially when you have the one crack-infused alien left) and castle adventure on a luggable [0]. I still have the luggable, it still works, and it still plays the games.
It was the reason I went to study AI (at possibly the worst time, in the 90s winter); I was very young when I first played it and obsessed with the large amounts of text it came up with under different circumstances. I found out how it all worked and programmed a bunch of adventures soon after, but the magic feeling that computers can make up human text stayed with me. Didn’t touch AI after until gpt2 came out.
What a lot of fun. It’s notable that I immediately decided I needed to kill the hamsters while avoiding their droppings. Lots of really good games reward players that subvert expectations. Earthworm Jim turning left instead of right at the start of a level. Braid Tim standing on a cloud and holding down fast forward for 20 minutes. Quake grenade-jumping up into impossible to reach teleportals. Every puzzle in Baba Is You.
What kinds of emergent behaviour / secret level / weird hacks could you introduce into space invaders? On mobile I can’t not-shoot the hamsters but maybe if I managed to dodge them with every single bullet they would land and make peace with their fellow mammals?
This page somehow disabled the control key for me, so it was an inconvenient workaround to close the tab (because of the way I have my browser GUI set up). Please don’t do that.
> The original website was hosted on Geocities, and LaCarte failed to register the hampsterdance.com domain. With the continued popularity of the original site, an unauthorized duplicate website was hosted on hampsterdance.com. LaCarte thus used the domains hamsterdance.com, hamsterdance2.com, and hampsterdance2.com.
