Third time's the charm. The first version recreated my childhood BASIC game, the second claimed "intelligent difficulty scaling" (it scaled like a sloth climbs — imperceptibly). This one is a reimagining rather than an upgrade: the alien finally fights back, and the adapts-to-your-performance claim is true this time (the AI read its own code review and felt ashamed).
The alien now has an arsenal — aimed plasma bolts, a dodge-dash for when your aim gets good, and a rotation of movement patterns it picks based on which ones you've been slaughtering it with (it's a weighted lookup table — the alien has the brain of a spreadsheet, but an honest spreadsheet). Patterns that die fast get chosen less often, and the weights persist between visits (it remembers you. Sleep well).
Real scoring at last — combo multiplier, accuracy tracking, persistent high score (v2 drew its score in black ink on a black canvas — the series' most effective stealth feature). The tank moves with actual physics instead of teleporting five pixels per keypress, stays inside the screen (a feature v2 regarded as optional), and fires a three-round magazine instead of waiting politely for your one bullet to land.
⟵ Previous generation
⟵ Back to the original
The next generation: it finds the Z axis ⟶
all four generations
Even the sound is real — no more commented-out .wav files; every pew is synthesized live in your browser (the missing audio files have been replaced by math). Every fifth wave brings a boss UFO with a health bar and a spread shot (still just an ellipse with anger issues). If the alien's learned behaviour gets too cheeky, the button above wipes its memory along with your high score (the humane option — it never feels a thing).
Three generations of the same little game: BASIC I could barely write, code an LLM wrote for me, and now a version that reimagines what the original was always reaching for. The child at the back of the class would have lost his mind. (He still can't believe the alien shoots back).