Pong and Beyond

342nd played so farGenre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Williams Electronics
Publisher: Williams Electronics

How’s this for some pleasant Sunday gaming? As I was playing the game to prepare for the blog, I was told that it was apparently one of the most difficult games ever. How’s that for fun?

Our Thoughts

Defender is a game we’ve seen version of before. The basic idea – flying around a planet, killing enemies you come across, is fairly familiar and frequently played with, with games like Wizball being a relation.

Your goal is to prevent aliens from kidnapping astronauts from the planet below. You do this by shooting the aliens and possibly helping the astronauts land again. Kidnapped astronauts return as evil mutants that are also bent on destroying you.

As easy as it sounds, the game is quite tough. The speed of the game is such that it’s difficult to chase after all the different enemies and when kidnapped, getting the astronauts free is tough – leading to another speedy enemy chasing you. I’ll be honest, we couldn’t get any further than the first level and generally failed at that anyway.

Looks and sound are quite simple, as expected – nothing notable here really. Simple and sweet I suppose.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the thing, going into a game being told it is one of the most difficult ever will undoubtedly lead to an anti-climax. Yes it wasn’t easy but it wasn’t as hard as other games like The Sentinel or Elite (which we started… and have not got back to it since). In fact it was a fun game to play for a little while but probably one we are unlikely to come back to since many games have come out since that have done things better.