11 March 2009
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After last month's epic investigation into Bubble Bobble, RG's poor
exhausted professor of posterity Stuart Campbell needed something a
little simpler to deliver a definitive documentary dissertation on. But
just so he didn't get off too easily, we made him play the hardest
videogame series of all.
THE DEFINITIVE...
In business, the worst thing you can do is get something right first
time. (Look at the GBA and
the DS, for example. How many of you bought the same console twice,
after Nintendo brought out a new version months later with all the
features that should have been there in the first place?) Hit the
nail right on the head with your debut release and you've got
nowhere left to go when it's time to maximise the projected revenue
streams from your brand franchise ("release a sequel", for those of
you who aren't some marketing tosser in desperate need of being
killed). All truly great games are delicately balanced, and can
easily collapse under the weight of gratuitous extra features thrown
in purely for the sake of adding something new to justify selling
you the game again.
Defender is one such
game. One of the most terrifyingly, instantly hard coin-ops ever
created, it has dauntingly complex controls, an unusually large
playing area which needs to be constantly monitored, and savage,
merciless enemies who you'll need every ounce of skill and firepower
at your disposal to stay on top of. Even the few players who have
mastered the game live on a constant knife-edge, where a moment's
lapse in concentration can lead to catastrophe - a planet explosion
early in Defender's five-wave "life cycle" will wreak carnage in the
most diligently-amassed collection of ships and Smart Bombs.
So perhaps more than any
other gaming legend, Defender is a title that's never been improved
on by any of its sequels. (If you make it harder you render it
utterly impossible to 99.8% of players, and if you make it easier
then your core audience won't be interested. And not only is it conceptually incredibly difficult to follow up Defender, the
game's physics and design are so finely tuned that the basic
mechanics of it will be wrecked too if you let anyone even slightly
cack-handed near it.) And if you're not convinced by that assertion,
join us now as we Hyperspace through history to prove it.
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DEFENDER (arcade)
Despite the
design still being tweaked until almost literally
minutes before the first player put a coin in the slot,
Defender was a huge hit from the word go, its
unprecedented difficulty like a gauntlet slapped across
the face of complacent arcadegoers used to the gentler
challenges of Galaxian or Phoenix.
It was also
widely and swiftly (and generally very competently)
ported to home platforms, from primitive machines like
the Atari VCS (see RG27's interview with author Bob
Polaro), Apple 2 and VIC-20 up to more capable hardware
like the Colecovision and C64. The few systems that
didn't get official ports saw excellent clones like the
Spectrum's Starblitz and Acornsoft's legendary Planetoid
for the BBC Micro. (There was also an even better
unreleased version of the latter, called "Super
Defender", which surfaced a while ago on the excellent
Stairway To Hell website.)
PLAY IT NOW
ON: There are lots of good ports for various formats,
most recently the bargain-priced Midway Arcade Treasures
collection for PS2, Xbox and PC, but you still can't
beat MAME's configurable controls for getting as close
to the coin-op experience as human(oid)ly possible.
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