107 · DEFENDER II
Alien marauders are attacking your planet. They're kidnapping resident humanoids and turning them into mutants! Y ou pilot your ship along the planet surface, blasting away. But first you go for the Landers--the most treacherous of the aliens.
SHOW NOTES
STARGATE
DEFENDER I
The Joy of Difficult Games - Defender
Defender 2000
Defender
Strike Force
Vid Kidz made this for HAL America in 1988. It is the NES version of the 1981 Williams arcade game Stargate, renamed Defender II, and we called it Defender 1 with two new power-ups. You fly a small ship over a scrolling mountain range that wraps around and try to stop aliens from abducting the humans below.
What works
- You can turn around. You are not scrolling in one direction. You can go left or right and backtrack, and the goal is saving humans, not just racking up points. That made it stand out from other shmups, at least at first.
- The claw game. An alien carries off a human like a crane machine. Shoot the alien and the human floats down for you to catch. Shoot the human by accident and they burst into a million pieces, which feels good and costs you points. Miss the catch and, put nicely for the children, they go away.
What doesn't
- Floaty inertia. The longer you hold the D-pad, the harder it is to stop, and unless you're very good the game doesn't reward you for going fast. The D-pad doesn't translate the arcade joystick well.
- Bullets or debris? Enemy shots and explosion particles look so alike, both little squares, that you collide with bullets mixed into the debris. The mountains are only backdrop, but they still trick your brain into thinking you will crash.
- The Stargate. It looks like a black hole, is actually rainbow colored, and moves you to the other side of the screen, where there may be nothing. We never used it on purpose.
- Same waves forever. The waves are all the same, just more enemies, the landscape never changes, and the game doesn't end. Later waves add nothing new, though we liked the idea that the blinking spheres are the ghosts of the people you're supposed to save.
Worth knowing
- Harder, not different. Eugene Jarvis, who developed Defender for Williams, said he made Stargate as a response to people who were really good at Defender, making it harder so they would not be as good. Nothing else is different, and we would have felt ripped off paying more for essentially the same experience.
- Irata. The alien race you fight is called Irata, which is Atari backwards, and we took it as Williams flipping off Atari.
The bottom line
Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List. Asked whether there is enough here compared with other NES arcade ports, we said no. It wasn't all negative: it's fun for what it is, and one minute will tell you whether this old-style experience is for you. We won't recommend a game you can judge that fast.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Back of the Box
- Manual
- Introductions
- Originally released in 1981 as STARGATE. It comes just 7 months after Defender.
- Defender doesn’t have the clout that other Arcade games do
- Made by Williams who brought us Joust, Robotron,
- Overview
- The player flies a small spaceship above a scrolling, mountainous landscape which wraps around. You try to save humans from being captured by enemy ships.
- The goal is to destroy the enemies to prevent the humans from being captured. You are armed with ammo and smart bombs.
- Gameplay
- Wrap Around Feature
- At the top of the screen is a mini-map, which displays the positions of all aliens and humans on the landscape.
- Saving the Humans
- At low height Humanoids can survive the drop on their own, but if the Lander is killed at too high an altitude, the player must catch the Humanoid with their ship and return him to the ground, otherwise he will not survive the drop.
- The Stargate
- The player's ship flies in front of the landscape and does not contact it.
- If all Humanoids are killed, the entire planet explodes, leaving the player in empty space. This also has the unfortunate effect of turning every Lander into a Mutant, making the player's job very difficult.
- Is there enough here to be entertained?
- Say compared to other Arcade NES ports?
- The alien race that is fought is known as the "Irata", being the name of Williams competitor Atari spelled backwards
- The Joy of Difficult Games - Defender
- Eugene Jarvis on Defender
- "In that era, I was making the game for myself. That’s the easiest thing to do. That’s the natural thing to do, really. You have your dream. What’s your ultimate game, in your head? You play games. You go, oh, I really like this game, but they kill you off too quick, wave three’s impossible. In this game, the player is too weak. How am I going to make this game better?."
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Defender 2000 - Atari Jaguar in 1995
- Mostly a 3D version of the original Defender
- Defender - Sixth Generation Consoles in 2002.
- Brings Defender plot to the SHMUP world
- Strike Force - Arcade in 1991
- Re-imagining of Defender with Two Player simul gameplay
- Defender 2000 - Atari Jaguar in 1995
- EGL
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
You are the only one who can save the planet, battle with aliens at the speed exceeding the speed of light, in dark unknown space, Defender 2.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Wow, hello everybody. How you guys doing? I'm doing great. When you were playing this game, were you under the assumption that you were exceeding the speed of light?
Entirely so. Because you see, when you are going through the speed of light, everything gets blue shifted, and there's a lot of blue. There is a lot of blue, but there's still a lot of red also in the game. That's the things behind you. The thing behind you gets red shifted. There's more black than anything. What are you guys talking about? Black holes go faster than the speed of light. No, it's really, really dark blue. Got it. True. Yeah, that's true. I always lean, is it dark blue or is it black? Yeah. I understand. It's dark yellow. I'm just glad that we're playing some hard sci-fi, finally. Yeah, yeah. So we are playing Defender 2, originally released way back in 1981 as Stargate.
Bet you guys didn't know that. I did not. So it only got the Defender 2 name for the NES and then everything afterwards, because I guess there was some legal problems with saying Stargate. I'm not too familiar with Star Trek, but would that have been the problem? There is a movie and TV series called Stargate, but I don't think it was active in 1981. Got it. And I actually did read a funny anecdote about it being called Stargate. Please. That's weird that it's just someone else's opinion that I agree with, that it's weird that it's called Defender 2 on the NES that doesn't have a Defender 1 and then changed to Stargate in arcades where it actually has a Defender 1 and not called Defender 2.
Right. And... Yikes. Because in the arcade, this actually, this comes out seven months after Defender 1. So that is pretty crazy that like they release it in the arcade and then it takes them just seven months to make this new game that they call Stargate. But if you've played Defender 1, you'll see it right away that this is very much a Defender 2. It plays exactly like Defender. Would you say it's... I mean, I didn't play it, but I watched Defender 1. And would you say it's like...
plays like Defender 1 or would you just say it's Defender 1? I would say it's Defender 1 with two new power-ups. Yeah, because it looks like almost exactly... I couldn't even find the difference. Yeah, it's also Defender 1 without any kind of processing power behind it. Yeah. Because somehow a 1981 game performs a little bit better than this 1988 game. Yeah, that's true. I don't know how they couldn't figure out how to just perfectly convert the arcade version to the NES here. We have seen some better arcade ports from like later arcade games. I would even argue like a game like Double Dragon.
Yeah. Translated it really well from the arcade. But I think we're going to get ahead of ourselves here. Let's just focus on Defender 1 for a minute since a large amount of our audience probably knows of that game too. That was a considered very difficult arcade game at the time. A little different than what you were playing if you were playing Pong or Pac-Man or Missile Command.
This one had a lot of moving parts to it. Did either one of you guys get a chance to play Defender 1 ever in an arcade or see it? I haven't actually played it, but I was watching some footage of it. It's, I mean, in 1981, I would have had a blast with that. Yeah, it was actually like my mom's favorite Atari 2600 game. We owned an Atari 2600 and she would always talk about the game.
Always. And I was too, well, I just think it's funny. It's like whenever we had the Atari 2600 out, she just wanted to play Defender. And I never heard of that in my like cultural zeitgeist. So I was like, all right, I'll try this out. And I was way too young to be any good at it. Like it didn't make, it didn't really make any sense at my young age of like four or five or however young I was. But Defender doesn't really have the clout that other arcade games do.
Do you agree? Why? Like you don't hear that name anymore. I mean, you guys talking about it, like, oh, everyone knows Defender. I don't think I knew Defender. I didn't say that. Well, I just assumed you and Mike are the same person.
I think like that's a game that I picture in an arcade lineup. You know, if I walk into an arcade, I'm kind of expecting it to be there, but it doesn't really have a place now. Like no one talks about it as much. And I think that's maybe because this was made by Williams, who really only brought us Joust and Robotron. And I'd argue you're more likely to even see Joust than you would Defender in an arcade these days. I know Joust. Most people, I think, would know Joust over Defender. And we've talked about Joust before in relation to Balloon Fight. So sure. I think Iwata was like inspired by it when. Ah, yes. All right.
We'll get into it, though. I don't want to stall any longer. We'll talk about Defender 2 if we must. First, the player flies a small spaceship above a scrolling mountainous landscape, which wraps around conveniently. You try to save humans from being captured by enemy ships. And the goal is to destroy all the enemies and prevent the humans from being captured. You're armed with ammo and smart bombs. Oh, and there's this little thing called Stargates, but we'll get to those in a minute.
Did I do a good job? I think so. You did a great job, Mike. Thanks. I wrote it down beforehand. Oh, scripted. Well, we have trouble with the overviews sometimes. I figured, let me just write this. I can't deny that. One thing that I really note that jumped out to me right away was because we always talk about shmups and how we, at least I don't like them.
But this stood out from the rest in the sense that, first of all, you're not constantly scrolling in one direction. You can turn around. I know it doesn't sound like that mind-blowing of like a crazy ability, but it's kind of cool to me that you can choose to go left or right and backtrack on yourself. And that you have a different goal that's not just kill everything or like get racked up as many points. Like you're trying to save these humans on the ground. So I thought that made it like, at least at first, stand out to me more than like a lot of other shmups.
Would you argue maybes, and we haven't even gotten to the controls yet, but do you think there's too many things going on here though? Like you have a screen that you have to kind of follow along in a mini-map to see your placement in regards to the enemies. Then you have the enemies, which you must take care of to clear the stage. And then you have these humans, which you can't see on your mini-map, but you have to make sure that they're being protected at all times.
I think definitely that the mini-map, I think it's cool. But yeah, it's definitely missing out on something with like not having your objectives on there, the humans on there. But I don't think it took away anything. I mean, not having the mini-map, I think would have been, I prefer having it to not having it, even if it's just showing the enemies. It was a few times when I was just trying to get that like last ship.
Yeah. You know, it was cool to be able to see like, oh, I'm coming up on where he is. The game can be pretty chaotic, but I don't think that any one element of like the HUD in the game itself really overwhelms you too much. Yeah. I actually think I would have preferred more things on the HUD, like a human count. Yeah. As we're going through, because I think you get five?
I think there's six. Six, okay. And there's no real way. Six people on the ground. Yeah, six people on the ground. And there's no real way of knowing until they're picked up by an alien. Then they, I think their shape changes color on the HUD. Oh. The alien enemy shape changes to like a different tint.
But there was no real sense of like, where am I going? Yeah. Am I heading? You know, you just kind of have to constantly like travel fast to the other sides to make sure that the other humans haven't been kidnapped. To clarify, in this game, when humans are kidnapped, it's not like, you know, once they are, once an alien grabs them, they're gone forever. It's actually sort of like a grabber machine. Like, what are those things when you put a quarter in and you're trying to- Yeah, like the claw. The claw. The crane game. Yeah, crane. Where they just pick up a guy and try to take him outside of your field of view.
So you can shoot whichever alien is holding him. And then they'll just sort of very slowly float back to the ground and you can pick them up. But you can also accidentally shoot the person. Shoot the person. I appreciated that feature. Yeah. You know, because it is, it's a lot easier to do than you would think.
Yeah. You, you have a bit of a stuttery control of your, of your spaceship. You don't have, you don't have a ton of precision. You're floaty. Yeah. So it's very easy to approach an enemy, shoot it, and then it continues climbing up. So you've actually, your laser has now shot the, the humanoid. Yeah. And they burst into a million pieces and it's kind of, it's kind of good. Like I, I like the feeling of it, even though it's, it's bad for my point total. Sick. All right.
The one thing that I did notice was that it took me a while to notice actually at first when I was playing was that when the, when they slowly dropped to the ground, as you mentioned, that's not a good thing. I thought that that was okay. They slowly dropped to the ground and they're okay. They're not. I think they splatter, right? They die. I mean, I assume they die. They disappear. They do. They go away. It doesn't count towards your bonus. They go away. Yeah. They go away. Put it nicely for the children. They go away.
Um, but yeah, you have to catch them in your ship, which took me like a single day. I can play through on like the first round and realize, oh, this is what I'm. And I never caught an alien in the act of just saving a human, but in the arcade version at low heights, the humanoids do like fall and survive, but at a certain height, it will kill them. I never got to see like an alien that didn't have them at like mid height already. Yeah. So I can't confirm if that stayed in the NES version, but a couple of things didn't make it over from the arcade version. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was also something that was just sacrificed in favor of just coding. They always die if you don't catch them. Yeah. It's not something that I noticed either.
So yeah, it would be kind of unfair if like, if they're like a foot off the ground and you shoot the ship, you're not gonna have time to catch them before they hit the ground. Right. So hopefully they would be saved. Uh, and then the stargate, which, uh, if we can talk about that for a minute, that is that black hole like thing that will transport you to the other square, black square. That is not black, but yeah, it's actually many rainbow colors. Uh, it'll transport you to the other side of the screen that you're on. And my understanding is, is that in the arcade version that actually warped you to a human in trouble. Okay. But that definitely is not the case here.
If you find the stargate and you go over to the other side, there might be nothing over there. Honestly, I didn't, I didn't use this at all because there's no point of reference in this map. Like there are, there are squiggly lines to, to show, uh, relief and where mountains may be, but none of it feels like a place. It's, it's just like, once I go into this portal, I just get spit out somewhere sort of, sort of different, but exactly the same.
Yeah. Um, so I never used it on purpose. I just accidentally fell into it sometimes. Yeah. It didn't seem like there was any real use to it except for a buffering mechanic to like, be like, Oh, well everything will freeze in time. While I get this annoying animation that transports me to the other end of the screen. It's worth mentioning that we're not talking about levels here because the waves are all the same. Just more enemies come on wave after wave. You, the landscapes don't change at all. Nothing, nothing about the game visually looks different. And I think that it's weird that we're getting such a bare bones arcade experience from 1981 here now sold at like, as like a full fledged game. I agree. I don't know.
Uh, so a little story of what I expected from this game. Mm hmm. I saw, I saw screenshots first and screenshots actually got me a little excited because it almost looked like a, like a vector graphics thing with, it's almost sort of looked like asteroids. And I also saw your little ship and I'm like, Oh, maybe this game sort of, it sort of feels like asteroids. Um, so I booted it up and there's, yeah, there's some momentum based controls, but at the end of the day, it is just a very, um, small scope shmup. But I would have really liked the game where it's like, you know, that whole, uh, inertia based control completely. And you just sort of have the tank controls. That's what I wanted this game to be. And it really wasn't that.
But, and, and tapping on, on the inertia controls there, I wasn't, I wasn't bothered by them at first, but the more I played the game, the more I realized they are my demise. And this game for a game that talks about going faster than light speed, unless you're very good at this game, it does not reward you for, for going fast. And you will easily collide with many, many different things. And don't get me wrong. I like that. There's the continuous scroll of like, that there isn't just keep going forward and forward.
I do like that you're able to go around, but it gets very messy very quickly. And with the inertia base thing, the longer you hold down the D pad, the harder it is to stop on a dime or, uh, you know, avoid your certain, um, your certain depth from, yeah, from those, from those different ships that are shooting things at you. Uh, and there's a wide variety of different enemies.
Right. And I think the inertia thing, I think it's really cool. And I, and I do think it would have been cool. Like Sean said, if they leaned into it more and made it a lot more, uh, with gravity too. Right. But the, um, I think the problem, not even that it's necessarily a problem, but I think just for us who've all played it like once or twice, I think the problem is probably that like, those don't really kick in and like how cool they are until you're really good at the game. And like, I feel like for us, it's just like, it just makes more sense to just take it slowly because you can. Yeah.
Well, I see that I agree that I definitely think like a good player could be better at this. Like feel like a bad, but I wonder, but I wonder if the fact that, and keep in mind that this is a, this is a port that definitely like remove things. So if they were working on changing code or whatever, why didn't they also think about how the D pad might be different than an actual joystick? Obviously in the arcade, you, you have the control of the, you know, the typical joystick that you'd be used to it with the D pad. It doesn't translate as well. It feels like if I had an analog stick, I'd be doing a lot better at controlling my whole range of motion here.
They should have tried to think about maybe there's only certain lines that you can land on it with the spaceship. So say that, uh, from top to bottom, there were 16 different placements that your ship could be in and you, you know, if like, so it'd be like a discreet, like snapping into grid, but a little more discreetly than that. Like hopefully there would be enough, uh, lines that you wouldn't notice it so much.
I don't know if that would work, but, uh, I, I, you know, again, I'm not, I'm no game designer, but I think that, uh, having like so much fluidity in, in the controls, you know, ultimately hurt my experience of playing this game than it did, uh, make it feel like, oh, this game's so punishing. Like you gotta take it, you gotta take it slow.
I think that an, another aspect of this game that makes the controls feel worse than they might be is in, um, the particle effects and the, um, actual ammunition that is being fired at you. They, they, they look very similar. So when you blow up an alien or one of the various sub alien things, um, you may get a bullet shot at you mixed up in all of that debris. And I just, I ended up colliding with that stuff often because I couldn't tell the difference. And we're talking about, you know, like pure little square pixels, no design really to this ammunition. I don't think it would have killed them to make the ammunition things longer lines and the explosion. Yeah. The square particles.
I, I, I definitely think that was a missed opportunity there. And I think that when you're flying around, uh, with all this momentum fighting you and it's hard to get around these things, it makes it feel even harder when you're not even sure which particles to avoid. Right. And I would even argue, I don't know if this happened to you guys, but it definitely happened to me that the landscape is weird too. And sometimes I would think like, Oh, it can't go down too low because I'm going to crash into the side of that mountain. Exactly. But there, but that's just a backdrop.
Yeah. You are actually like in front of everything. So those things don't have consequences, but they trick your brain a little bit. And they, and since they don't have any real consequences, uh, other than being backdrop, they're actually more distracting in that way because they're just vector art as well. So everything kind of just merges into one and you just have to basically hope that you're not touching anything other than your ship. Like just keep your eyes on your ship and avoid anything else you see.
There's also different kinds of enemies too. You know, there's the ones that like chase you around those blue guys. Uh, they were, they were strange. Then there's the, uh, the blinking sphere like thing. I like to think of those as a ghosts of the people you're supposed to save because that only, they only appear when an alien makes it to the top of the screen. Oh, so they probably, they probably are like a leveled up version of that. And so I could see that. Uh, I was also thinking of the, uh, not that, but the ones that look like mines, you know, the, yes, the purples. Yes. And they, they explode out those projectiles when you shoot them. So you have to be careful of them.
I think there's certainly enough variety in the end. Yeah. I wasn't hoping for anything. Even on like level one, there's a good amount. Well, they don't actually add anything. They don't in later levels. I think it's just more of stuff.
Yeah. Maybe I just, there are some that I maybe didn't notice on the first level. Like the, the, I think there's like the flying saucers or something. I mean, I can't remember now, but I think those just appear halfway through a level. And then the, yeah, there are some that literally just like materialize out of thin air. Yeah. Just like all this energy goes towards one being generous, calling it like energy the lines go towards one point and the ship appears. I mean, this is all just lending itself to the fact that this is nine early eighties game design. We are not in 87 or 88 anymore. This is 1981 game design. Um, does this game end?
It doesn't end. Okay. It doesn't. It's a high score game. Uh, and even, even in the, even in the playing tip section of the manual, it does like, it does pretty much say like, you have to be able to get it. You have to be cautious playing through this, but at the same time, it's recommending like save residents faster for higher rewards. Like it's so focused on all these score things, but it's upfront disclaimer is like, Hey, you know, you, you can't just like think this is going to be a cakewalk because the game was designed to be hard. True. The biggest question, uh, I think on everyone's mind is that comparing this to other arcade NES ports. Is there enough here?
No. Yeah. I don't think so. All right. Did you guys just like give away your essential games votes? What? Why'd you ask the question, Mike? Why would you ruin the essential games list? Well, I just figured after the music, everybody could use a little like, you know, disruptor in the middle of, in the middle of the second act, they've revealed their essential game votes. Now I might just have spite. Are you allowed to vote on spite? I almost always vote on spite. Well, we're clearly almost done talking about defender here. So, uh, defender two, that is, uh,
but you wouldn't know the difference really if you booted them up, uh, next to each other, I guess the, uh, the alien race that you fight in the alien race that you fight in defender two. Did you guys know, did you guys catch their name? I remember reading the manual and realizing that it was another like hack job, but I don't remember the name. What is it, Mike? Irata. Which is backwards for Atari.
Atari? Atari. Well, Guitari, you know, I don't know. I don't know why I said Atari. Uh, this whole segment's been a mess so far. So, uh, it's Atari. Maybe that would have been more shocking if I got it right the first time. So we're making, so they are like doing a, uh, uh, a flick you off. Yeah. Williams is doing a flick you off to Atari.
And I think that's, I think that's kind of funny. So you could use more game humor like that. Apparently there's a bunch more of like these spelled backwards things throughout the, uh, The Aragain Falls. Oh no. Also just like in the high scores of Williams games, they do stuff like that too, or they call out programmers in the high scores. I'm like, that's not news. Like that happens all the time. Yeah. I also don't like it when there's already like a populated high score in my games. How do you guys feel about that? I prefer to have it blank.
Right. I want to make those high scores. I don't want to like find out after I die that I didn't even make the top 10. Yeah, exactly. I guess it's true. There's already scores that you have to beat. Yeah. That kind of sucks. And, uh, I also was looking up, you know, cause I found this game pretty difficult. So I was looking up articles about Defender 2's making of, and I found this article from Gamma Sutra, who is awesome. They make a lot of great, uh, articles on the business of making games and, uh, the art behind it too. And the art behind it too.
And the great postmortems too. With Eugene Jarvis, who was the, um, developer or lone developer of Defender for, uh, Williams at the time. And he had this to say about making the game. In that era, I was making the game for myself. That's the easiest thing to do. That's the natural thing to do, really. You have your dream. What's your ultimate game in your head? You play games. You go, oh, I really like this game, but they kill you off too quick. Wave 3 is impossible. In this game, the player is too weak. How am I going to make this game better? He just keeps going on this tangent. And it's like, I think he was starting to design another game right there on the spot.
But he did go on to say that he made Defender 2 at the time, he calls it Stargate, of course, as a response to people who were really good at Defender saying they won't be good at this one. Like, he watched good Defender players and then made a game around the idea of like, how do I make it harder so they're not as good? But it seems like that's all he focused on because nothing else is different. Nothing else is different. I agree. And I think that that's really lame.
I think that also, if you're going to try to make a game harder in the arcade version, if the Stargate truly did take you to the side where the humans were in trouble, then you really didn't make the game that much harder.
I feel like this would have been a quick patch to be like, oh, now the game's not as hard anymore. And then smart ass kids would figure it out eventually and be even better than before. They're getting higher scores for sure if they're able to do more things at once. I don't think a game like Defender 2 was alienating good Defender players. It was just alienating people who like Defender but didn't like how hard it was already. I would love to listen to this as somebody playing Defender in the 80s. And is any of this accurate?
Like, are we talking, are we speaking from the heart of the Defender player or are we just imposing this on them? In what regard? I feel like there was no statement being made. Like, I don't think there was any offense taken by Defender players when this game was released. Well, if you're good at an arcade game back then, right? Or let's just say even now, you know, Joe will use your example, Nidhogg, right? Like, you love that game.
Forget about Nidhogg 2 for a second and think about what if they just said like, oh, well, we'll just add more traps so that the players die more frequently. Would you have been okay with that? I don't think what would have bothered me was like, oh, they're just trying to make it harder because I was good at the game. And that's definitely weird. I think what bothers me is that like, it's the same game with like, it's just, it's just too, I would have, I would have felt ripped off. Like, I spent more money for essentially the same experience. I guess it's a little harder, but like, it feels like it's not as much.
When I was looking back at Defender 1, it took me a while to confirm that I was in fact watching a video of Defender 1 and not Defender 2. Like, that's how similar it is. I feel like I would have felt kind of ripped off if I purchased this and was like, oh, it's the same overall. And I have to address the elephant in the room here, which is, didn't Nintendo wind up doing this with Super Mario Brothers 2 in Japan where they just said like, oh, players are really good at Super Mario Brothers 1? Well, they won't like Super Mario Brothers 2. We added a poison mushroom.
But at least those are different levels. It's not like it took the same level and added like more Goombas. True, but the graphics are the same. Yeah. I mean, I've never played it, so I'm not really speaking of my authority. Well, we'll play it eventually. Don't worry. We play everything. All right. I mean, that's it. That's my thought on Eugene Jarvis. I just thought that was like a weird, you know, developers don't usually go out of their way to say like, well, I challenged the fan base to be better. I gotta say, I love the name though. Eugene Jarvis. It's a lot of G in there.
Yep. Defender is not without sequels and spinoffs though. A game like Defender 2 would surely get Defender 3, right? No. It did not. It did not get Defender 3. It did not get Defender 4 or 5. It jumped right up to Defender 2000. Wow. Defender 2000. Wow. released on the Atari Jaguar. Nice. In 1995. I think they jumped the gun there a little bit. They had some time. They didn't get into peak Y2K territory yet. But it's mostly a 3D version of the original Defender. Defender 1. Is this from behind the... I meant like just with 3D effects but still on a 2D plane. Gotcha. 2.5D. Cool. Well, let's go with that.
That's not where Defender ends though. Then there's Defender in 2002. Nice. The sixth generation of consoles. That's the GameCube, the PS2, and the Xbox. They all got this and it brings the same Defender plot, which we all care about. With RPG elements. An open world. To the shmup world. Now it's a shmup. Is this not a shmup? This isn't a shmup because here's why. Like you said. There's no level. There's no enemy waves and stuff like that. There's like... I don't even know. Is that what defines a shmup? And power-ups too, I would argue, at the core of it.
I like to think it's shooting. Shooting them up. Well, you do. Shooting them up. Shooting them all up. You know what? I think we should reclassify all shmups and games like Defender as ships and shoots. Ships and shoots. It's got a ring to it. Ships and shoots. I would think that Defender is first an arcade game. That's how I would describe it. But I would also consider it a different kind of shooter. When you hear shooter now, you think of... That does sound like you're doing a GoFundMe commercial for it.
When you hear shooter now, obviously a lot of people think of first-person shooters and stuff like that. But I'm arguing that Asteroids was a shooter. I'd say that was an arcade game, Mike. Right, but I said that too. I said if we can't generalize things to arcade games, right? Yeah, arcade games can be shooters or it can be fighting games.
Like Donkey Kong is a platformer. I think it's a shooter. Okay. That's weird that you think that you can't even shoot fireballs in that one. But he shoots barrels at you. We're not done because there is something else that's apparently loosely based on Defender. It's like a reimagining by Williams. It's called Strikeforce. And it came to the arcades in 1991. And it is Defender, again, with two players simultaneous. It took them 10 years to do that. It took them 10 years to figure that out. What else was Williams making?
I don't know. Did they do pinball machines? Yes, they did. They did a lot of pinball machines. Yeah, maybe they're more known for the pinball machines. Look, I love pinball, so I'm not going to pretend that I can just name a bunch of Williams pinball cabinets. But I'm sure that was a good line of their business. And they were getting completely schooled by Atari and Namco and other game companies at the time that these arcade games were kind of like second rate. So speaking of second rate, let's talk about the Essential Games List.
It is not essential. I also say it's not essential. But I say we were really negative on it. It's not that bad. It was fun. You know, I like the floaty controls a little bit. It's just weird to have a retro game already. Yeah, you're right. It's old. It's outdated. Like, for what it is, I was like, yeah, it's good. I'm not about to recommend a game that it would take one minute for someone to figure out if they would like or not. Like, just figure it out on your own, people. Okay, like, it doesn't belong on our Essential Games List. But if you're curious, it'll take you one minute to figure out if you're into this kind of experience in 2020. Hindsight, 2020.
All right. I am Michael Esposito. You guys know where to find me, at Esposito Film on Twitter. We also have another Twitter. It's called NostalgiaCast. And that's our main Twitter. We do everything there. We post so many cool things. You won't believe it.
People write to me often and they say, what about the website? And I'm telling you right now. Some of you might think we have one, but we don't. We don't have a website anymore. We never had one. You were the website the whole time. Right. The Nostalgia website was actually haunted by a ghost. Because of the article on there. And, yeah, and the three of us got together one night and we defeated that ghost in combat. And so the website is now gone.
We're thinking about just starting a GitHub where we can post a bunch of TXT files that were the actual articles. I think that's a legitimate solution. We're looking for legitimate solutions if any listeners have them, if you guys want to figure this out. We think the Twitter is great for getting all this information and also directly contacting us. I think that's a great way. We haven't heard from some of you guys in a while. Dante, where are you at? Why do you got to personally call him out? Because I think he mostly wrote to us on email and we don't have an email right now.
We are so poor we can't even afford a free Gmail account. Well, maybe he doesn't have a Twitter. I'm thinking we'll get a Gmail, though. I just think we shouldn't be pointing out specific people. I'm sorry, Dante. Tweet at us with ideas for what our Gmail email should be. Should it be NescalgiaCast at Gmail.com? Or should it be something like Bigobills at Gmail.com? Like, what should it be? Bigobills. I think it could be anything. It could be, you know, JoeCastu should be the host at Gmail.com.
These are all valid things. People have said these things. No one said those things. Nobody knows who JoeCastu is. Nobody said GoBills is the real Go. Who is that? I can't believe you said my last name on the podcast. Oh, my God. I voted you? Well, would you like it to be taken out? I actually said it, I think, on the first episode. Yeah, I think you did, yeah. But we're going to remaster that. You can take it out. Look out for that. We're going to remaster the first episode and the second episode and all the episodes. Hashtag Free Dante.
Let's go. Thank you.
