I remember the first time I played Space Invaders; it wasn’t Space Invaders, for one thing, but a knock-off variant on my uncle’s CPC464, and I found it a bit bland and went back to playing Firelord.

A rather sedate moment in the life of the Space Invaders. Rest assured, it'll be dramatic within seconds,

A few years later, I’d played the proper version of it, and grown to enjoy the version that YS covermounted in its dying days.

Many of the modern variants have left me cold, but Infinity Gene makes me glow warmly. It is a good game.

The graphics are teeny-tiny, but this doesn’t matter. When you’re controlling your ship, you drag anywhere on the screen – it’s relative positioning, so you choose which part of the screen you’re covering. More iPhone games would do well to adopt this. And auto-firing; SI:IG uses autofiring, as frankly having to tap to fire on a screen where there is no tactile feedback feels awful and uncontrollable.

Sound? A throbbing, pulsing and ever-changing soundtrack. Levels can even be generated by choosing music from the iTunes library, and those levels are unique to that music.

I should mention the game; there is a neat trick at the beginning, where it’s bog standard Space Invaders, and just as you get halfway through a level, it all breaks down with a growl. And the game evolves. And therein lies the beauty of it; the game keeps changing. The better you get, the more it changes; new crafts develop, new enemies threaten you, and all the time the music is pumping, the game speed is changing and you’re sweating and trying not to die and then you do and you go back for just one more go, but by now it’s 3am, and you just want to sleep and you know you’re going to have to tear yourself away, but it’s not going to happen, and you know that the only thing that is going to free you is that the iPhone battery life cannot surely hold out longer than your ability to stay awake.

You wake up three hours later, with the iPhone clammy in your hands, laugh confusedly, and put the phone on the shelf next to your bed and immediately doze off again.