Defender

Playing arcade shooters from the later 70s and early 80s is honestly such a treat. Every game I touch seems to bring something new and interesting to the table, progressing the genre and medium forward in tangible ways that you can still see in modern game design. This was such an inventive and innovative time, before the genre conventions had had time to solidify themselves, and you had multiple different conceptions of what a shmup is competing with each other and developing in tandem. It was already exciting seeing Scramble introduce this project to the linear scrolling shooter last time, but seeing Defender smashing onto the scene with a completely fresh conception of what a shmup's control scheme and structure should be is simply electrifying.

Much like Scramble, Defender presents the player with a horizontal side-one perspective, but it limits the stick movement to vertical positioning. Despite this, the game doesn't scroll automatically, nor is it confined to a single screen; much like Spacewar! and Asteroids, you have a gas button. The play field is a wide strip of space with (harmless) terrain at the top and bottom, which wraps around at each horizontal edge wrapping around, and you can move around it freely, adjusting yourself vertically with the stick, moving forward with the gas button, and pulling a snappy U-turn with a dedicated "turn around" button. Immediately this completely changes the feel of combat, you're cruising around from what part of the arena to another, taking daring strafing runs and then hooking back around for an immediate counterattack, and enemies are smarter and more aggressive than they've ever been before to account for this.

Much like in Rally-X, the player is afford a radar screen to display a small, simplified view of the whole playfield to aid in pathfinding and target prioritization, and it's very much needed as the basic enemy type in this game mostly ignores you unless you happen to be in view for it to take potshots at. Instead, the basic Lander seeks to reach the bottom of the screen and abduct one of the ten or so small human figures standing on the terrain, at which point it tries to abscond to the top of the screen with them and you're obliged to shoot down the enemy and, should it have reached high enough for the fall to pose a threat to the hostage, catch the human and deposit them safely on the ground. Not only do you get points for saving these humans (defending them, if you will,) the game also gets harder the fewer you save. If a Lander successfully escapes into the sky with a human, it will turn into the much deadlier Mutant, which aggressively dogfights you, swooping around just outside the path of your gun and firing at you from all sides, necessitating similarly cavalier maneuvers on your part to take them out. Should every human be abducted in a stage, the terrain will disappear entirely and you'll be trapped in a void with a swarm of aggressive enemies until you die.

It makes for quite an engaging setup, requiring you to keep an eye on the radar and see who's getting too close to a human so you know what enemies to prioritize, and there's a good push and pull of risk/reward here as well. Letting a Lander pick up a human is obviously dangerous, but you get a 200-point bonus if you destroy the Lander and let the human fall to the ground from a low enough height to be survivable, or 500 upon catching the dropped human and another 500 for depositing them on the ground. If you're confident in your ability to efficiently take out hostage-laden Landers and recapture the dropped quarry, you can farm big bonuses off of your enemies, but there's the ever-present risk not only of letting the lander get away, but even of killing the human, as they hang off the bottom of abducter's ship, getting dragged upward into the path of your bullets.

After you clear the first wave of enemies, you get bonus points for every surviving human, and then it's on to the next stage, which introduces two new foes to contend with: the Cluster, which when shot will explode into a swarm of tiny, highly-mobile enemies that will fly around seemingly at random and shoot at you, and the Bomber, which mostly ignores you, instead making its way around the field dropping lines of mines which you'll have to avoid. It's at this point that one more mechanic which I've thus far neglected to mention becomes very relevant; Defender is the earliest game I've played to feature a Smart Bomb mechanic, a single-button screen-clear which simply erases every enemy in view in exchange for one of your limited supply of ammunition. The level of complexity that this game can offer with its varied enemies and the relatively limited space for them to inhabit makes this an absolutely essential fallback weapon for when things are simply too hairy to survive otherwise, and it's really a feather in the cap of this game's varied, convoluted, and brain-tickling combat.

Aside from the raw mechanical puzzle they've constructed, the game is also simply gorgeous in motion, replete with vibrant flashing colors, enormous shrapnel-filled explosions, and a frankly shocking number of active sprites on screen at a time. I get the impression the developers were well aware of just how exciting of a package they've put together here for the the score-chasing arcade addicts out there, because the game not only features the standard "Top 10 players of all time" high score list, but a separate leaderboard tracking the top 10 players of the current day in particular, giving ambitious players two separate benchmarks to shoot for. The game is fantastically compelling, consistently challenging, and utterly unique. To this day I don't know of another game that plays anything like it except Housemarque's 2013 spiritual successor Resogun for the PS4, which, while an excellent game in its own right, is frankly not as good. Defender is undeniably an enduring classic, and any fan of the genre, or just anyone interested in video game history, would be doing themselves a disservice not to check it out.