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.