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Defender

Game Mechanics

The player freely moves a ship for profile to the surface of a planet and the goal of the game is to destroy all enemies and save humans captured by aliens. The gameplay requires a lot of precision, because enemy ships are small, like the laser shot of the player's ship.

Defender is the first video game to use the technique of differential scroll2 that consists in scrolling the layers representing the decor at different speeds in order to simulate a motion perspective (the more the element of the decor is supposed to be distant, the more it scrolls slowly).

Defender is also one of the first video games (on the first) to incorporate in the top of the screen a mini radar screen that displays in real time all the current picture, the cadrage of the current view, the player's position, the enemies, etc. This kind of radar screen will be taken over by many video games in multiple forms.

Defender is still one of the first games to incorporate five buttons: one to shoot, one to activate the reactor and thus move the ship forward, one to reverse the direction of the ship, one to transport the ship elsewhere in the table, and the last to use the ship smart bomba bomb that destroys any ship in the main screen. The joystick only allowed to move the ship vertically. It took some time to get used to these new controls, because most games shoot 'em up until then only one button (to fire).

The number of bombs is limited; We need to use them with parkimony. Obviously, the more we advance in the game, the more the number of aliens increases, the faster they are, and the more they shoot on the player's ship, which culminated in a game end loaded with adrenaline and the fatal explosion of the last player's ship.

Every 10,000 points, the player wins a new life and a new bomb.

Special cases: if an alien who has captured a human reaches the top of the screen, he then "digests" this human, changes shape and becomes extremely aggressive, both at the level of his very sacked movements (difficult to target) and the cadence of his shots. If the 10 humans available at the beginning of the game were eventually digested, the player then suffered a cataclysm: the mountains flew in bursts, all the aliens supposed to appear progressively appear simultaneously in their aggressive form. Even if the player finishes this cataclysmic level, the next level will appear without mountains and without humans and all aliens will appear simultaneously: the adrenaline rate rises very high when it happens and it was not uncommon to see getting a good ten spectators around the player who was contorting to find the phenomenal firing cadence (from the order of 10 to 15 seconds on the button). If however the player reached a multiple level of 5, then this level appears with 10 humans, and the mountains are back. Another special case: if the player is too slow to finish the level, flying saucers make their appearance, very flat and therefore difficult to target, they are the only aliens of the game able to catch up the ship when it is at full speed.