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, including 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.
 

STARGATE aka DEFENDER 2 (arcade)

Incredibly, the game Williams brought out as the follow-up to Defender was even harder and even more complicated. Grown men wept openly at the prospect of coping with yet another control button - this time for the "Inviso" shield that granted your ship an all-too-brief period of invulnerability, at the cost of not being able to see where the hell you were.

Set against this were a whole raft of ferocious, fast and (worst of all) tiny new enemies, who'd taken the original game's Swarmers as their role model but ruthlessly purged all of their friendlier, kinder aspects (which were pretty hard to spot in the first place). Designed to mercilessly destroy even those autistic superhumans who'd mastered the first game, Stargate is insanely difficult for mere mortals, and didn't have a fraction of the success of its parent.

PLAY IT NOW ON: MAME. Stargate was converted to very few home platforms at the time, but there was a tremendously good Atari VCS version, with arcade-like graphics (compared to the flickery Legoland cityscape of the VCS's first Defender) and an impressively cunning solution to the complex-controls problem whereby you could assign functions to the second joystick and operate Inviso or Smart Bombs on the floor with your foot.
 

DEFENDER 2 (Atari ST/Amiga)

This little-known release, published by the short-lived Atari spinoff Arc and coded by famous hippy developer Jeff Minter, is something of a pioneer, marking one of the first ever attempts at updating an arcade classic for (at the time) modern home formats. It features (ostensibly) conversions of both original Defender and Stargate in addition to the new "Defender 2" remake, and unfortunately that's pretty much where your reporter runs out of good things to say about it.

This is a gaming atrocity on a spectacular scale - the "conversions" of the arcade games were crude and jerky and took a mallet and blunt chisel to the precisely-poised formula that had made the games such a hit in the first place, and the update is even worse.

The complex-but-intuitive arcade controls were arrogantly junked in favour of a hideous, awkward mouse-and-keyboard combination that apparently left no room to include the Hyperspace function (rather like leaving the power pills out of a port of Pac-Man), and the wildly excessive speed combined with a slideshow framerate (if you ever saw the Max Headroom movie, you'll recognise the experience of playing Defender 2 as rather like watching a blipvert) ensured that even if you could remember which control did what, it still wouldn't stop you smashing headlong into even the most innocuous enemy long before you saw them coming.

There seem to be some quite interesting things happening in Defender 2 (particularly the various drone ships with different powers), but it's so horribly badly executed that you'll never get to notice any of them.

PLAY IT NOW ON: The Amiga emulator WinUAE.
 

STRIKE FORCE: DEFENDER 3 (arcade)

Perhaps even less well-known than the home version of Defender 2 is Midway's arcade sequel from three years later, perhaps because the "Defender 3" part of the name is relegated to a small-print subtitle on some versions of the title screen.

(For reasons unknown to science, Midway were extremely shy of publicising the game's link to the Defender series, and on the version currently playable in MAME there are only the tiniest clues, such as the high-score table entries spelling out "DEF", "END" and "ER". I'm sure that the revision on the JAMMA board in my cellar displays "Defender 3" on the screen, but tragically my Supergun's SCART output seems to be knackered and I can't check.)

In play it's unmistakeably part of the family, and enjoys splendid, detailed graphics and some spectacular pyrotechnics, but as was the style of the time (this was the era of arcade remakes like Smash TV) it's been swamped in a billion extras and powerups and complications which - piled onto a game as already-overwhelming as Defender - were just far too much for most players to cope with.

PLAY IT NOW ON: Strike Force runs well in MAME.
 

DEFENDER & JOUST (Game Boy)

While theoretically just a conversion of the original, this one deserves separate inclusion as an example of just how grossly inaccurate a job it's possible to make of replicating a simple old game, until it's effectively something completely different.

Pretty much everything's been screwed with here - the Mutants are now terrifyingly savage enemies who can match your speed at maximum thrust, while the previously-lethal Baiter becomes a dumb piece of cannon fodder that flies slowly in a straight line right into your laser blasts, on the incredibly rare occasions it can be bothered to show up at all.

The planet's been shrunk, there are only half-a-dozen Humanoids occupying it instead of 10, the scoring is wrong, there's music (thankfully optional), Pods and Swarmers don't appear until several screens late, and the view is so zoomed-in that there's no point looking at the main screen at all, as unless you play by the scanner you'll have no time to react to anything dangerous that appears.  

Since the game's comically easy unless you let any Mutants show up (at which point it's nearly impossible), the only sensible strategy is to callously murder all but one of your unfortunate Humanoids straight away, then sit and wait by the other one (or rescue him then carry him around), turkey-shooting the hapless Landers as they ponderously trundle along towards it. Which, y'know, kinda undermines the point of the game being called "Defender", a bit.

(For pocket defend-o-fun, incidentally, a vastly better port was released for the Game Boy Color in 1998 under the confusingly-reversed title "Joust & Defender". There's also a PSP version on Midway Treasures, but it's pretty unplayable.)

PLAY IT NOW ON: Visual Boy Advance.
 

DEFENDER 2000 (Jaguar)

After his stellar success with the magnificent Tempest 2000, Atari perhaps thought Jeff Minter had finally nailed the updating-classic-coin-ops routine, so they gave him a second stab at Defender.

It was a decision that turned out to be on a par with asking Gary Glitter and Jonathan King round to babysit while you went on a six-month backpacking holiday, and when you additionally threw in Atari's own constant interference with the project (like switching its planned format between a graphics-heavy CD game and a more restrained cartridge one), you might as well just have left the cocaine cupboard unlocked at the same time and been done with it.  

Creating a remake of Defender that was worse than Defender 2 should have been an impossible task, but with Herculean effort the Jag version just about pulled it off, largely due to zooming in the view and thereby introducing the stupidest feature that anyone could ever have imagined putting in a game where the most vital objects are on the ground - vertical scrolling.

Luckily, in the "Defender 2000" game (the cart also came with a sort of My First Defender port of the original for kids, and a half-decent tweaked version called Defender Plus) your gigantic, clumsy, inertia-heavy craft was so absurdly over-powered that even when you couldn't see where you were going or what you were shooting at (ie pretty much all the time), your autofiring, auto-targeting drone ship ensured that it didn't really matter - if you just kept flying and trying not to crash into stuff, the game would largely play itself.

Coupled with tacky, eye-watering graphics (psychedelically garish in Defender Plus, miserably dark and gloomy in Defender 2000) and the same ludicrously over-the-top speed that ruined Defender 2, the overall effect was like throwing up on a waltzer at Barbara Cartland's house in a power cut during a thunderstorm. (On LSD, obviously). Just terrible.

PLAY IT NOW ON: Defender 2000 is just about playable (at least, as playable as it gets) in Virtual Jaguar, albeit painfully slowly. The wise choice is to take the hint.
 

DEFENDER (Game Boy Advance)

Poor old Defender. There's so much going on in this release, and it's all so stupendously awful, that it defies comprehensive explanation in this limited space. There are three main game modes, of which the least atrocious is "Classic", a fairly straightforward port that's only really ruined by the diabolical control, which is at once treacle-slow and over-sensitively twitchy (depending largely on which axis you're moving in).

Then there's "Defender XP", ostensibly the classic game with updated graphics, but which actually uses a confusingly different control method, with the d-pad effecting normal directional movement rather than the traditional thrust-and-reverse (executed with the shoulder buttons) of the classic mode.

Worst of all, though, is the default main game, "Defender XGP", which is simply an utter mess. Massive graphics that resemble the aftermath of sneezing on your GBA reduce manoeuvring space to a minimum, five selectable ships overcomplicate matters pointlessly, and the gameplay is diluted with all sorts of incomprehensible "defending"-related missions and subgames. It's nothing like Defender, and it's even less like a good videogame.

PLAY IT NOW ON: Visual Boy Advance.
 

DEFENDER (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube)

Strangely, though, at more or less the same time as the GBA atrocity Midway also released a modern updating of Defender that brought it unmistakeably into the 3D age while still retaining the core values and atmosphere of the original. Evidently somewhat modelled on the successful Gamecube title Rogue Squadron, the 2003 Defender actually does away with almost every identifiable feature of the 1980 game, but nevertheless captures an appreciable amount of its frantic, against-the-odds feel as you scoot around various deep-space outposts protecting them from a ferocious alien onslaught.

Slightly optimistic sales forecasts at the time mean that the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube versions are all fixtures in the £5-or-less bargain bins of most game stores, and while it's not brilliant, it's well worth picking up at that price. 

PLAY IT NOW ON: Your PS2, Xbox or Gamecube, obviously.
 

DEFENDER (mobile phone)

Normal service, however, was resumed in 2005's port to mobile phones. You might well think that trying to adapt a game like Defender onto a mobile phone's tiny screen and keypad was one of the stupidest ideas anyone's ever had, and this mangled version with its gigantic graphics and microscopic screen area would confirm your suspicions. Still, maybe someone'll get it right on the Wii, eh?

PLAY IT NOW ON: Some sort of mission of self-punishment.
 

DEFENDER (Xbox 360)

...or the 360, as it happens. Xbox Live Arcade was made for games like Defender, and in common with their other XBLA conversions Midway made a thoughtful and professional job of it. You can play with original graphics or some tasteful new ones, and a variety of control options make this probably the friendliest official Defender to play ever made. That's not to say it's any easier as such - the savage difficulty level is as uncompromising as ever - but at least now you're just battling the ferocious enemies, and not the controls too.

PLAY IT NOW ON: Your Xbox 360, assuming you've already bought it - Midway's XBLA titles were all pulled from the service in early 2010 "due to evolving rights and permissions", according to a Microsoft spokesman.