Communist Mutants From Space

Both more and less sophisticated than the 1982 VCS original, this fan remake enhances the graphics and mildly fortifies the Cold War backstory -- your dashing space pilot now one Harry McCarthy dogfighting waves of cosmic Marxist monsters on behalf of the Anti-Communist Force of Earth.

Basic gameplay remains much the same: your ship is confined to sliding along the bottom of the screen, from where it shoots up at rows of eggs slowly jostling from left to right, Space Invaders-style, and which periodically hatch and discharge nasty Communist Mutants at you. Atop the eggs is the historical inevitability, the Mother Creature, nurturing her zygotes with dialectical materialism and sending them into the fray just about as quickly as you can dispatch them with your good ole one-two anti-Communist bourgeois knowhow. The Mother uses her row of eggs as a protective shield barrier of sorts, scurrying back and forth using her young as cannon fodder while she repairs gaps in the shield. To progress you must shoot both the buffer eggs and the Mutants which emerge from them, but the primary goal of each level is to take out the Mother Creature -- following which the proletarian enemy masses fail to regenerate.

One innovation of this remake is that you can recruit a second player to back you up -- a success on the battlefield but an ideological compromise given Kropotkin's writings on federating for mutual aid.