ASCII Invaders is a unique twist to the classic Space Invaders game, which uses nothing but ASCII characters in text mode for the entire game. The gameplay is almost identical to Space Invaders, with a few fun features added, like nuclear bombs and other interesting things. At the very top of your screen, you will find statistics like your score, the number of lives you have left, and other valuable information.

The core gameplay of ASCII Invaders is a fixed shooter arcade game where you take control of a spaceship at the bottom of the screen and shoot at enemies that appear at the top of the screen. The enemies are all lined up nicely at the top part of the screen and will be constantly moving from left to right. Once they have completed one cycle of left to right, they will move down by one row, inching closer to your ship, to which they will inevitably crash into you. So, your goal is to destroy all these enemies before they reach the bottom.

One of the cool things you will notice is that occasionally, there will be a fast-flying enemy that will appear at the very top of the screen. Destroy that enemy with skill and precision, and you can bag a good amount of points on top of everything. At further levels, when you are down to one enemy, they may suddenly speed up toward the bottom of the level to where your ship is. You need to destroy them as soon as possible before they can reach to the same line as your ship and crash into you.

Moving on to the more technical aspects of the game, the graphics and visuals of ASCII Invaders are extremely simplistic, as everything in the game is just ASCII characters in text mode on top of a black background. There are the typical sound effects you would expect from a retro game such as these to improve the nostalgia, too.

To sum it all up, ASCII Invaders is a pretty decent game to try out if you want to play a free game similar to Space Invaders, which was a big hit back in the day. Head on over to dosgames to play this one for free now.