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Four generations in, and the game finally found a third dimension. The same duel — tank below, alien above — but the UFO now approaches from deep space instead of sliding politely down a flat screen (a flatlander no longer). Its bolts come at you with real depth, and yours travel into the scene as tracers (your high school trigonometry, vindicated at last).
Everything the previous generation learned survives the jump: the movement patterns, the dodge-dash, the weighted lookup table that remembers which tactics get it killed (it learned in three dimensions and still gets hit). Waves escalate, every fifth brings a boss with a health bar, and the weights persist between visits (it remembers you in 3D now — that's not better).
Rendering is WebGL via three.js, loaded from a CDN — the one concession this page makes to the series' single-file rule (writing raw WebGL would be very impressive, which is exactly why nobody does it). Sound is still synthesized live, the score is still visible (a tradition the second generation courageously abandoned), and the tank still can't leave the screen (some lessons stick).
The child with the pencil and the copybook drew this game in two dimensions because that was all the squared paper allowed. Somewhere in the margin, this is the one he was actually imagining.