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Alien invaders besiege the helpless population of a
planet, and you are the last line of defense. Ideally, you must destroy the
aliens before they can abduct humanoids from the ground; if an alien ship gets
to the top of the screen with a captive, it absorbs that unlucky soul and it
becomes a much more dangerous and aggressive Mutant.
Smart bombs give you the option to wipe out everything alien on the screen,
but of course you only have three of them at the outset of the game. You can
also perform an emergency hyperspace warp, not unlike a similar maneuver in
Asteroids, but you could rematerialize in a far more
perilous situation than the one you just left. When you go to the next level by
eliminating an entire alien fleet, you receive a bonus multiplied by the number
of humans who are still safely on the ground.
(Williams Electronics, 1980)
For many people, Defender is the pinnacle of video games, hands down.
Fast-moving, unrelenting, hard to beat but easy to become addicted,
Defender was always a bit too fast for me - but it's a perennial
favorite for so many others.
Defender begat a multi-part saga of Lucasfilm
proportions. Next up was the very similar - but even harder - sequel
Stargate (also commonly seen packaged as Defender II, which was
followed by a ground-based run-and-shoot masterpiece called Robotron: 2084. The fourth and final
entry in the Defender saga was a first-person space shooter called
Blaster. Defender creator Eugene
Jarvis was at least partially responsible for each of the four games in the
Defender cycle.
Atari was the first company to snatch up the rights to Defender,
turning out an Atari 2600 edition which was only slightly
less screwed-up and flickery than the train wreck they sold under the name of Pac-Man. Versions for the Atari 5200, ColecoVision and several
home computers redressed the balance. Entex manufactured a handheld,
battery-powered, LED-display version of the game around the same time.
Defender has since resurfaced in a perfect emulation on Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits.
Rating:
A whole dollar - trade it in for more quarters, you'll be playing this
game a lot.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
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