Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: No 60Hz: No DTS sound: No Extras: Game History, The Making of Defender, Trailers The last Midway game I reviewed, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, I said didn't need much explanation. Defender only does if you're not a child of the 80s. You were placed on a two-dimensional screen in a small, lengthy spaceship going backwards and forwards across a barren landscape while bizarre aliens of various green shades would grab humanoids from the land and carry them away. You had to stop them before they reached the top of the screen and went mental, and then catch the falling humanoid to save them and return them to the ground. Of course, if you wanted to be a complete bastard you could try killing them all while scooting along the ground, but only in a bid to see how long you could survive once all the aliens went automatically mental. It was a game that can still be bloody hard today. Once thing I could never figure out - why did I always die after the third or fourth hyperspace jump?

First of all, it's easy to see that the graphics are vastly improved over the original arcade game now it's in 3D. The creator of the original states in the DVD extras that there's as much memory used in a PC desktop icon as there was for the whole of the original Defender game! The enemies glow menacingly from a distance and explode nicely close-up, while graphics general are crisp and sharp. The landscape is generally barren apart from added buildings, but then this is the way it was meant to be. You can easily swish about from side to side and arc round again to kill a baddie you missed. Sound FX are reasonable for what you'd expect from a PS2 game with the bonus of including the game's original effects when you fire your weapons.

However, when all's said and done, this is largely just a flying around game, like the original was, but in 3D and we've been here dozens of times before including G-Police which, on its original release on the PSX, was a fantastic experience to behold, but it's getting a little long in the tooth now. I'd recommend a rental first and only buy if you think there's longevity in it. What I couldn't find on this disc was the original Defender - something I was hoping for. I even searched on a good game cheats site, Gamefaqs.com but to no avail. For those who want to track down the original, you'll have to download MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) from MAME.dk and then search for the ROMs to play on it, but while you can only technically download these if you legally own the originals (yeah, right!), tell me, where else can you play them? There's hardly any decent arcades left with games still working from the 80s.

For those who look beyond the game, this disc also has DVD-style extras. First up are two brief featurettes lasting just a few minutes each. The first, Game History, traces Defender back from its early roots and includes comments from Eugene Jarvis, the original's programmer. The Making of Defender shows how things progressed for the 2003 update. Trailers are also included for three Midway games, Defender, Dr Muto and Haven. It's interesting that the Defender trailer is ELSPA rated 15+ while the game is only 11+. If this was a BBFC video/DVD rating, the whole package would be a '15'. I don't see why it's rated that strongly though. However, since the others are too - and the Dr Muto one tells you precious little about the game and isn't in any way offensive - someone must've slipped the rating in in error.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2003.