Heck, it even has an interesting collaborative mode for two players, but overall, it just had more stuff happening with more independant entities than anything else I can think of at the time.

Extended game summary:

On your side, there’s colonists running around on the ground, and marines. On the bad guy side, there’s little lizard men and big lizard men who shoot at you. If a lizard man grabs a colonist, they mutate the colonist into another lizard men.

Weapons are sitting around on the ground; lizard men pick them up and use them to shoot at you.

Marines can be summoned, and they then hang off the bottom of your ship shooting at the lizards; if you drop marines off on the ground, they’ll run over to the colonist to rescue them, fighting lizards as they go. The marines then grab the colonist and jump up and down to try and return the colonist to your ship.

So there’s always a balancing act between carrying marines around to give your ship greater firepower where you are, or leaving them on the ground to fight off the lizards and help to rescue colonists.

Collaboration; your ship can be in fast mode or slow mode. Fast mode is typical Defender; slow mode flies much more slowly but can shoot in all directions. In two player mode, you can dock the slow ship onto the fast one, so player 1 flies and player 2 can shoot in all directions.

Also, you can buy weapons between different levels, and different powerups have different effectiveness on different enemy ships; you choose which level you’re going to go to after rescuing everyone on the current one, so you can judiciously buy the right powerups for what you’re going to encounter next. (this isn’t new these days, but back then it was a lot more innovative, especially in a game in _arcades_).

Seriously, people, if you haven’t played this, you have _got_ to try it.

I remember reading about Jonathan complaining about price of the 360 version… so why now PC version is more expensive?

I’ll hope the STEAM version have STEAMworks achievements….

I don’t know anything about the real impact of piracy or how to combat it, but I do know that as someone who buys my games, I really hate DRM – I had heaps of issues with GTAIV, heaps of problems with it, and they were all related to the overbearing DRM. I think that if it’s a good game and the price is right, people will buy it.

Oh, and pre-order on online distribution is useless without a discount or added bonus.