Me and Micronet have a bit of an odd history, because it felt like I kept stumbling upon their ineptitude out of sheer coincidence or perhaps those above just have contempt for me for reasons only known to them. I played their shitnum opus known as "Heavy Nova" many many moons ago when I first discovered emulation and used Gens as opposed to better things out now like Fusion. It would be a defining moment for what it means to truly be an inconceivable mess deserving of the most amount of scorn possible. If your game is as unplayable as Heavy Nova, or as gross and offensive as Square's Tom Sawyer then it deserves capital punishment to the nth degree, no exceptions.

I've written essays that dragged for way too long on Black Hole Assault (also known as "Butt Hole Assault" in certain circles) and Revengers of Vengeance, meanwhile I simply compared Heavy Nova to a battery acid bath. Needless to say my opinion didn't change when I first joined the site, I doubt it changed now. It was massively funny for me to find out they made a shmup before any of these mistakes of mankind thanks to fellow BL user Jenny, which of course piqued my interest since I'm a weird person who enjoys digging through garbage, because I've explored retro libraries to the point I couldn't care less about so-called "hidden gems" because I've discovered them ten years before Little Joey Baloney on Youtube claimed to find them and made them mainstream and normie.

Upon booting Curse on my handy dandy Everdrive Pro I went into gameplay and thought I was playing an MSX game with how choppy it was running. With some practice I probably could've counted the frames it took for the enemies to cross the screen and do their little choreographed patterns. Needless to say, thanks to this the game was like taking multiple candies from multiple babies. I'm actually ashamed to admit I kinda liked the option system, I'm sure it was hocked from another shmup, and I'm just blanking on where it was from prior since I'm not exactly in my "Cold Comfort Zone" so to speak. I apologize to whom I've alluded to on the off chance they read this.

It's worth note that the game runs so terribly and is so badly optimized that I couldn't pull up the in-game menu of my Everdrive. Which is too bad, because apparently the boys at Micronet realized their game was too easy, and instead of doing a proper difficulty curve they instead made the final stage do an R-Type impression of blasting the player with lasers and changing the rules by making them redo the stage instead of respawning like normally. Save states would've been appreciated, but I guess even my hardware was trying to tell me that this game really wasn't worth the time. A shame too, because I was actually ready to go a bit easier on it, but I guess I really shouldn't be surprised by the lads who thought becoming slower and more useless as you took damage would translate well to enjoyable gameplay in a beat'em up/fighting game. I'm afraid to say Earth Defense/The Earth Defend still sweeps as Curse didn't softlock on me after killing the first boss, nor do the sprites look like a toddler's first outting in MS Paint.

May Micronet's whimper of a legacy carry onward to remind us what garbage truly smells like. For this, I salute you.

Reviewed on Nov 05, 2022


2 Comments


1 month ago

didn't really understand the 1.0 ratings until I hit the last level. well, now I understand!

1 month ago

@curse oof, hopefully it wasn't too painful playing this underwhelming shmup masquerading as you, despite it's fantastic cover art lol.