Zogging Hell!!!

One thing I hate about reviewing VCS games is that the word classic appears rather too often. So I'm not going to use it in this review of Defender. No, not at all. Defender is a classic (bugger) shoot'em-up. You move from left to right blasting things (which on the 2600 version really are things) while protecting your base from being sucked up by other things. O.K. these things probably have a name, but I'm far to young to remember what they were (if someone is speccy enough to know, please write in). The 2600 version is not without it's share of problems. Your ship dissapears when you fire your weapon, and the scrolling is atrocious until you pick up speed. Yes that's right, Defender uses similar principles to Asteroids in that once you get in motion, your ship takes a while to slow down when you try and put on the breaks. Finally and most annoyingly sometimes the enemies missiles dissapear (in fact so do the enemies) so you can suddenly explode without realising it. But as I've said before, the VCS version has got it all in the gameplay and once you've got used to the graphic glitches your left with a hell of a game.

Zogging Hell Rating 7/10