The Earth Defend
released on Feb 01, 1995
Earth Defense (aka: The Earth Defend) is an unlicensed game for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis; it was developed by AV Artisan and published by Realtec in both North America and Taiwan, without a license from Sega.
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The Earth Defend? I sure hope it does!
Curse brings me lots of entertainment in how utterly garbage it is, so I was telling friends about it once again when I saw "The Earth Defend" mentioned in Vee's review of the former. I had a bit of trouble imagining that this game could be even worse, so for shits and giggles I decided to pick it up.
Well fortunately it doesn't feature the sandpaper framerate that Curse does, but on the other hand it has a shocking amount of slowdown despite that it looks like clip art on Google Images. What went wrong here, especially this late into the console's run? It even softlocks sometimes from what I've heard, and when I tried reloading a savestate after returning from a break it just froze and made screeching noises at me. How does it have so much trouble functioning?
In this game, you're given a choice between two weapons, a spread gun and a beam that looks like a fingernail. The spread gun is dogshit, so you're better off using the fingernail, but when the spread gun item appears you have to avoid it until it despawns after 30 years, much like in Fire Shark. Your hitbox seems to be wider than you are, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it was just a rectangle that encompasses the whole sprite. It makes dodging both enemy bullets and powerups you don't want into a huge hassle, but to mitigate this there's a shield that makes you invincible for a bit. Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather just have a normal fucking hitbox. It's better to save the shield for the bosses anyway and just set yourself up inside their own hitbox. After you kill five, the last of which being much smaller than all the previous ones, the game's over.
Between this and Curse, I can't really say which is better. Both are sorry excuses for a shmup and a total waste of time, but at the very least Curse is funnier to me. The Earth Defend, despite its ridiculous issues, is ultimately just not very interesting.
Well fortunately it doesn't feature the sandpaper framerate that Curse does, but on the other hand it has a shocking amount of slowdown despite that it looks like clip art on Google Images. What went wrong here, especially this late into the console's run? It even softlocks sometimes from what I've heard, and when I tried reloading a savestate after returning from a break it just froze and made screeching noises at me. How does it have so much trouble functioning?
In this game, you're given a choice between two weapons, a spread gun and a beam that looks like a fingernail. The spread gun is dogshit, so you're better off using the fingernail, but when the spread gun item appears you have to avoid it until it despawns after 30 years, much like in Fire Shark. Your hitbox seems to be wider than you are, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it was just a rectangle that encompasses the whole sprite. It makes dodging both enemy bullets and powerups you don't want into a huge hassle, but to mitigate this there's a shield that makes you invincible for a bit. Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather just have a normal fucking hitbox. It's better to save the shield for the bosses anyway and just set yourself up inside their own hitbox. After you kill five, the last of which being much smaller than all the previous ones, the game's over.
Between this and Curse, I can't really say which is better. Both are sorry excuses for a shmup and a total waste of time, but at the very least Curse is funnier to me. The Earth Defend, despite its ridiculous issues, is ultimately just not very interesting.
Earth Defense aka The Earth Defend is an unlicensed vertical shmup brought to us by the technical masters at AV artisan.
When you first boot this thing up you'll be greeted by an okay looking intro with a big close up of your ship, and unfortunately I have to say that's probably the highlight. Once in-game you'll find sprites that look like something out of a children's coloring book, as well as very bland backgrounds, and very unimpressive sound effects. The gameplay quite literally slows to a crawl at times with tons of slowdown whenever things actually become active onscreen, it's very depressing going this deep into the Genesis' lifespan of 1995 and seeing it have more troubling slowdown than early releases on the SNES. Super R-Type would lap this thing twice in a foot race.
The gameplay shifts between tedious and braindead, this is thanks in part due to the easy long drawn out gameplay and the limited shield powerup that you can activate at will. On each of your lives you start with three of these shield power ups, they basically render you completely invincible for about what feels like ten seconds. As you can probably tell that sounds absurdly broken, and it is. It's especially broken on the boss fights where you can just sit in their hitboxes and hold down your shoot button to unload ten million bullets a second into their face. Believe me, you'll want to do that all the time, because otherwise these bosses feel like they take entire centuries to die. I absolutely do not joke around when I feel like I could make breakfast in the time it takes for the first boss to die if you don't cheese it with the shield. A fun fact I learned about this first boss is that sometimes the game doesn't register you beating it after it's defeated, leaving you to sit there on that screen until you reset. Thankfully that didn't happen to me in my playthrough.
You can get upgrades to your terrible peashooter weapon, but some of them just feel awful to use. The spread gun version of it is just atrocious, you can only have one spread of bullets on screen at once and it's only three tiny bullets that fire with large gaps between them, and many enemies take more than one hit to die. It's very rare that an easy game can make me feel useless, it's quite an accomplishment I must say.
In a post-Thunder Force IV world this game looks even more ridiculous, it's unlicensed sure, but that doesn't mean it's any less pathetic. It's an embarassing shmup to say the least. I've played legitimately worse games, but any game that commits the cardinal sin of being boring especially in the shmup genre deserves scorn. Action 52 is better than this thing, I mean every word of what I just said there. At least I'm entertained when I played that, I literally almost fell asleep playing this thing.
The Earth Defends, more like...The Earth Defecates.
When you first boot this thing up you'll be greeted by an okay looking intro with a big close up of your ship, and unfortunately I have to say that's probably the highlight. Once in-game you'll find sprites that look like something out of a children's coloring book, as well as very bland backgrounds, and very unimpressive sound effects. The gameplay quite literally slows to a crawl at times with tons of slowdown whenever things actually become active onscreen, it's very depressing going this deep into the Genesis' lifespan of 1995 and seeing it have more troubling slowdown than early releases on the SNES. Super R-Type would lap this thing twice in a foot race.
The gameplay shifts between tedious and braindead, this is thanks in part due to the easy long drawn out gameplay and the limited shield powerup that you can activate at will. On each of your lives you start with three of these shield power ups, they basically render you completely invincible for about what feels like ten seconds. As you can probably tell that sounds absurdly broken, and it is. It's especially broken on the boss fights where you can just sit in their hitboxes and hold down your shoot button to unload ten million bullets a second into their face. Believe me, you'll want to do that all the time, because otherwise these bosses feel like they take entire centuries to die. I absolutely do not joke around when I feel like I could make breakfast in the time it takes for the first boss to die if you don't cheese it with the shield. A fun fact I learned about this first boss is that sometimes the game doesn't register you beating it after it's defeated, leaving you to sit there on that screen until you reset. Thankfully that didn't happen to me in my playthrough.
You can get upgrades to your terrible peashooter weapon, but some of them just feel awful to use. The spread gun version of it is just atrocious, you can only have one spread of bullets on screen at once and it's only three tiny bullets that fire with large gaps between them, and many enemies take more than one hit to die. It's very rare that an easy game can make me feel useless, it's quite an accomplishment I must say.
In a post-Thunder Force IV world this game looks even more ridiculous, it's unlicensed sure, but that doesn't mean it's any less pathetic. It's an embarassing shmup to say the least. I've played legitimately worse games, but any game that commits the cardinal sin of being boring especially in the shmup genre deserves scorn. Action 52 is better than this thing, I mean every word of what I just said there. At least I'm entertained when I played that, I literally almost fell asleep playing this thing.
The Earth Defends, more like...The Earth Defecates.