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.