Defender

"Umm... What?"

This probably isn't the worst to grace the GBA, but I have to say... It's gotta come pretty close. The sheer awfulness of this game is staggering. I'll try to describe this badness in as much detail as possible, but forgive me if I come short of the majestic terror that this game unleashes. I have to say (reverently, I might add), it takes raw talent to make a game this bad. If Ed Wood decided to make a video game, I envision his magnum opus being something like this.

Where to start... Where to start? Well, let's start at the title screen. We see that Defender is copyrighted material by Midway and blah blah blah. Then we see the Midway logo. Then we see a logo for Outlook Entertainment. So far, so good. Then we see the Defender title screen. Shortly, the music starts up. Honestly, I think that Pac-Man starts out with better music than this. I kid you not. The music here sounds like a bad MIDI file that someone threw together while he was bored. It's a couple guitar riffs and some poor drum effects. Words really don't do this music justice. You have to hear it to believe it. And this is the only music in the entire game! Defender has four game modes, and they all take place against the backdrop of eerie silence.

Let's move on. From here, we go to a game select screen. As mentioned, there are four game modes here. The classic Defender arcade game, faithfully reproduced on the small screen. An XG mode, which is essentially the classic Defender with better-looking graphics. An XGP mode, which is sort of like a mission-based story mode. And two-player co-op XGP mode. We can also access the high score tables here, and change the difficulty. To navigate this menu, we have to press the shoulder buttons. Yep, you heard right. The L and R buttons are used to select which game we're going to play. Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it have been infinitely easier to just press left or right on the directional pad?

Let's examine the classic Defender first. Everything looks good at first glance. It looks just like the original arcade game. It sounds like the original arcade game... Until you try to move your ship forward. The designers tried to mimic the arcade game's counterintuitive controls by using the L and R buttons to turn around and accelerate, respectively. For the uninitiated, Defender is a simple side-scrolling game where you pilot a spaceship and blast aliens who are trying to kidnap helpless humans. The alien landers will descend toward the landscape at the bottom of the screen, pick up a human, and then rise toward the top of the screen. When a lander makes it to the top with a human in tow, he mutates into a mutant alien who will come after your ship and actively try to destroy it. There are other alien ships and mine layers, but that's pretty much the gist of the game.

The controls on the original Defender arcade machine weren't all that user friendly. A joystick moves your ship up and down, a button accelerates, another button is used to turn around so that you're facing the opposite direction, a button to fire the lasers, a button for smart bombs, and a button to enter hyperspace (teleports you to a random position on the field). Now I know there are Defender players who mastered these controls and got it down to an art form; but c'mon, let's be reasonable here. The controls for this coin-op game were counterintuitive. The Atari 2600 solved this control problem by virtue of design moreso than intent. All we had there was a joystick and one button. As I remember, using a joystick to accelerate and turn around was infinitely easier than having to press buttons. The joystick is intuitive. To accelerate, you simply move the joystick in the direction your ship is facing. To turn around, you move the joystick in the opposite direction. Slicker than snot.

Anyway, back to the debacle that is GBA Defender. Our designers at Outlook Entertainment tried to mimic the coin-op controls by using the R button to accelerate and the L button to turn around. This makes the game about as playable as... a moldy ham sandwich. But let's set this bit of lunacy aside and face the music. Defender has not aged well at all. I remember pumping countless quarters into this game at my local arcade (and its sequel Stargate, aka Defender II). But in this day and age, it looks and sounds incredibly dated. Good for perhaps a moment or two of nostalgia, I suppose. Personally, I find nostalgia to be an unpredictable beast. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It kind of has a mind of its own. Case in point: Midway Arcade Treasures. When I got that on my PS2, I played Defender for about two minutes, whereas I played Gauntlet for hours.

But I have to digress (otherwise this review runs the risk of becoming as incoherent as its subject). The version of the legendary coin-op that we have here manages to be less playable than its coin-op counterpart. No small feat.

Let's move on. XG mode is pretty much the same as the classic game, with better graphics. A colorful backdrop scrolls past as you accelerate. The player's ship and the aliens have been updated. The landers look like yellow scorpions, or... something. Sound effects are the same as the classic game. Thankfully, this game gets Atari 2600 controls. Acceleration and turning around is accomplished with the directional pad (the way things should be). The problem here is that the little aliens and the bullets they fire are sometimes hard to make out against the background. Perhaps the classic coin-op had a plain black background for a reason...

Finally, the meat of this game is XGP mode. This is sort of like a story mode. Six missions, each with a different backdrop. We have to play each mission three times before we can move on to the next one. A text field gives us our mission objectives, and we can select a ship to use before each mission. The game sports a variety of different player ships, but the only things that really set them apart from each other are their shields, speed, and the names given to their weapons. Whether you're using the Defender ship with "Megaton Laser and Incendiary Bomb" or the mighty Drater with "Arc Blaster and Da Bomb" (I kid you not, this ship's secondary weapon is named "Da Bomb"!), it's all pretty much the same. Your ship fires a generic laser bolt and drops equally generic bombs. The only differences I'm noticing here in ship performance are that some ships are faster than others, and some can take more hits before going down.

The game-play here is... well, to describe it as "incredibly awful" seems a bit charitable. After two minutes of playing this, I felt like tossing it aside and never playing it again. Thankfully, we're given Atari 2600 controls here. We're treated to a nice-looking background, just like in XG mode. Everything is big. Your ship is big. The aliens are big. The bullets they fire are big. And our ship is always in the middle of the screen (in contrast, your ship will drift to the side of the screen in Classic and XG mode, offering more time to react). By the time you actually see an alien on-screen, he's pretty much right next to your ship. You'll find yourself accidentally ramming into aliens before you can get off a shot. Your ship can take two to four hits before going down, and you have a limited stock of lives for the entire game. I found the only way to safely play the game is by watching the radar at the top of the screen. It shows your ship as a blip in the center, and enemy ships appear as blips. It's almost possible to play this game exclusively with the radar map. Just line yourself up, fire away, and hit 'em as they come on-screen. Our designers put effort into colorful backdrops and graphics, and I'm spending most of my time watching the radar.

Because everything is so big, there's almost no time to react when a lander grabs a human. He'll grab the guy and be at the top of the screen before you know what's going on. If you do manage to shoot a lander that is ascending with a human in tow, the human will fall about as fast as you can move and splatter on the ground below (they die if they fall too far).

The backdrops look pretty good. They're not awe-inspiring, but neither are they bad. One problem I found, however, is that landers can blend in with foliage in the background. The lander is green, the foliage is green. Built-in camouflage. Our sound department here is... quite terrible. The classic sound of lasers firing has been replaced with a wimpy sound effect. It sounds like a bad MIDI bass drum. Your ship fires little wimpy bullets instead of the sweeping laser beams of the classic game. Humans make badly produced outcries when they're devoured by landers, and sometimes the landers make equally bad noises when they're destroyed.

There are six missions here. Play each mission three times. Play a terrible bonus stage. Then we're off to the next mission. Most of the mission objectives consist of defending someone or something. Defend the humans, defend the convoy, defend the moon base, and so on. We start out at Earth, defending humans in classic Defender style. Then we move on and defend a convoy of ships that is traveling to the moon. Then we defend the moon base. The aliens have ground forces here as well as the ever-present spaceships. Then we're on Mars, defending another convoy. Then we're on Europa, attacking the alien base. Finally, we return to Earth and defend humans again.

After we complete each set of three levels, we are treated to a bonus stage that completely redefines the word "terrible". We're flying some sort of ship through an asteroid debris field, and our objective is to pick up humans by flying into them. The problem here is that the asteroids and debris in the background are virtually indistinguishable from those in the foreground. All I can say is, don't be surprised when your ship abruptly smacks into a piece of debris. Thankfully, we don't lose a life for this.

I played XGP mode, made it to the final level, lost my last life there, and honestly didn't care enough to try to finish it again. XGP mode supports two-player link capability. Your friend needs his own copy of this game, but would you really want to subject him to that? I suppose it might be good as a joke gift. I have to say, if I had paid $2 for this game, I still would've felt kind of ripped off.

There's gotta be a silver lining here, but I'm struggling to find it. What I do know for sure is that the next time I see the Outlook Entertainment logo, I'll be thinking "Whoa! Ed Wood made another video game." In fact, I'd say that this game has the potential to develop a cult following, much like Ed Wood's legendary "Plan 9 From Outer Space". It's almost got that "so bad it's good" thing going on.

I wouldn't say that this is the worst game on the GBA. I mean, at least they give us proper Atari 2600 controls for two of the games here. The backgrounds look nice. I suppose things could be worse. But this game comes so dangerously close to that nether realm several miles past Mediocrity... I'd say the rating of 1 out of 10 here is well earned.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/05