Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Defender

Now we're effing talking. Just look at this sexy slice of Eighties game-ery.

At a time when 'monochrome and piss-poor looking' was the order of arcade gaming, Defender strode in with its big ol' steely balls of steely steel and said screw that. This bullet-tastic adventure brought us explodey spaceships in sixteen --count 'em-- glorious colors. What a time to be alive.

The game was released in 1980, by Williams Electronics. It's a side-scrolling space shooter, which tasks you with... blasting the hell out of an encroaching alien horde. As did most other damn arcade games of the era. You cruise along the surface of an enigmatic planet, destroying anything and everything in the name of the high score leaderboard.

Well, not so much. There's a difference here. The smartasses among you probably noticed it alluded to in the title. Defender, as opposed to Crazy Mofo Attacker, is about... defense. Part of your objective is to protect the astronauts you encounter, most of whom could probably do without a big ol' freaking laser beam to the face. That kind of BS could ruin someone's whole day, after all.

As such, it's a little more tactical than your average arcade offering. Y'know, a little. Not that elderly games were ever particularly big on the old brain-thinkin', but it's less one-dimensional at any rate. This is also true of the plot, which most arcade games would throw in as a half-assed afterthought. If at all.

Not so here. The creator of Defender, Eugene Jarvis, knew his shit. That is, he knew that this was shit. As he stated in The Ultimate History of Video Games,
"I had this whole justification for why you were there and what you were doing. A lot of games fall short. They just put you there, and all of a sudden you're beating people up and you start to wonder. "Why am I beating these people up?""

(according to the all-knowing Wikipedia)

The message is clear: don't beat people up without a darn good reason. Not even space-people. But when they're busily abducting humans, that kind of crap's just not cool. Blast away.

Defender is another of those timeless classics from the Golden Age of arcade games. It is legendary for two reasons: the huge influence it had on later releases, and for being a huge bitch. If you're looking for a nostalgic challenge, suck on this one for some good ol' fashioned difficulty.