Game 48: Defender

Name:Defender
Number:48
Year:1981
Publisher:Williams
Developer:Williams
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour

Defender is one of those games you might have played a clone of without realizing it. The player is the last human space ship, defending what remains of the human race, a bunch of idiots walking around while aliens try to kidnap them. You shoot them down and grab the humans before they fall. The player can only shoot left and right, but he has complete movement. The ship has inertia, so keep that in mind when just flying around. Further, the player gets a bomb, which destroys all enemies on-screen, and a teleport function, which teleports. Simple to learn, difficult to master, the motto of arcade games that don't cheat you out of money.

I'm playing the Intellivision version, because that's the console I grew up with and I don't understand MAME. I don't know how smart of a choice this is on my part, because the demo's player AI looks completely incompetent. And with arcade games there's always flaws in porting them to home entertainment systems. This is one of those eras where that choice isn't deliberate. Ironically this version was made by Atari for some reason.

There's not much I haven't already said. If you suck at it, the first level's okay, then the second gets really hard. Arcade machine, remember? At that point I just get absolutely slaughtered. The game might as well be called, Morpheus Loses at that point. Its incredible, everything I try to do in-game I fail. Seeing as its another unwinnable arcade game it seemed prudent on my part to give up.

As to the score, I'm giving it 1 in enemies, non-enemies, player agency, graphics and sound. That's 5. I'm just not the kind of person who enjoys these kinds of games, and I'm not really the kind of person to give a good write-up on such an important game. I'd suggest if you do want something like that, to go here.