And so we got Defender, another one of those games most people have played and loved. Defender holds the distinction of being both one of the first really complex games and for being hard as hell. For once, you're not just blasting enemies - you've got a job to do. Defending the people of your planet successfully earns you more rewards than just going on a murderous rampage. What's more, if you fail to keep the planet safe the game punishes you by making it more difficult to reach high scores and by bombarding you with difficult enemies.
Defender is one of those games that still stands up today. The controls are a little archaic and take some getting used to - the fact that you have to push a button to turn around is really irritating as a modern gamer, for instance - but the game itself is still plenty of fun. Defender spawned a variety of sequels, most notably Stargate (or Defender II) and even a PS2 remake.
The version of Defender I played was emulated in MAME.
In Defender you control a ship armed with deadly sparkly lasers. Your goal is to use these mighty weapons to stop aliens from kidnapping all the people on your planet. Unlike most shooters up until now, there's no limit to how many shots you can fire at once. Feel free to blast away! You've also got the hyperdrive from Asteroids which will still get you killed. To move around you need to hold a button and there's a different button for turning.
Those green guys are called Landers. They bob around and lazily fire at you. They're not all that accurate but since you're a fairly large target it's important to always keep moving. Landers will randomly head to the surface of the planet, grab a colonist and try to float off the screen with them.
If you manage to blast a Lander while it has a colonist, the colonist will start to plummet back to the planet's surface. You can grab the colonist midfall for a quick 500-point bonus, then return it to the surface yourself for another 500 points. This is a much quicker way to rack up points than just fighting enemies; you can even save and return multiple colonists at once, though there's no bonus for this. You have to be careful, though - the colonists are not immune to the destructive effects of your sparkly lasers. One stray shot will atomize them.
Saving colonists is a good thing for several reasons: you get lots of points for doing it, if a Lander escapes with a colonist it becomes a much more deadly Mutant and if all ten colonists on a planet die or are carried off then it explodes.
You're in trouble when that happens - you have to go through the next few levels with no colonists to save while being bombarded by a stream of Mutants and other nasty enemies. It's not worth the points you'd get for killing all these baddies. Best to just keep the colonists safe.
But you ALSO have to save the colonists quickly! If you take too long during any given wave these little green UFOs show up and start darting around you, firing wildly. They're basically a death sentence.
This game gets very, very hectic from the very start. You need to rush around blasting enemies (but carefully because they might have colonists!) and saving colonists (but carefully because they're surrounded by enemies who shoot back!) and you have to do all this quickly (but carefully) because if you don't then that UFO will show up. It's pretty nuts. After you've killed all the enemies attacking the planet, the wave is over. You get bonus points for each colonist that wasn't killed or kidnapped, then the game moves on to the next wave.
There's other enemies too. These pink things split into a swarm of red orbs when you shoot them, which then proceed to mob and destroy you. They're nasty.
All in all it's a pretty demanding game! You've really got to focus to get anywhere in Defender, which is a trend we'll see often as arcade games become more and more complex. This also showcases the variety of gameplay that will come to define the 1980s.
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