Defender: Together Retro Discussion

[Durhey]

Hey all. I'm a long time reader of the site, but wanted to sign up for this retro discussion.

First off thanks to Racketboy for the Together Retro idea (and the site in general of course). Finding a group that can discuss games intelligently, let alone games that are over two decades old, is pretty tough.

I just recently left a job which had a vintage Defender arcade cabinet, so of course I was using the original arcade controls. I'd played the game quite a few times in the past, but it take take some re-getting used to after years of more traditional shmup controls.

Personally, I can see why trying to map the thrust/reverse controls onto a joypad or keyboard would be frustrating. These controls were never meant for anything other than the original button layout (and vice versa, I don't think any other games used the Defender setup other than Stargate). However, the difference is that on a joypad, if you have thrust and reverse mapped to the face buttons, you'd have to move your thumb or finger to use the two independently, and mashing fire while doing all that must be really tough.

On the cabinet, you just spread your fingers across the fire, thrust, and reverse buttons, and you can access all three in unison. So that you can mash on fire while holding thrust and occasionally tapping reverse.

I feel it adds a level of control, but definitely sharpens the difficulty curve. It's like the difference between driving clutch and automatic. Sure, you can do just fine with an automatic, but if you want to get the most out of your engine, you have to shift at the right time. Consider the official high scores are up around 80 MILLION points.

So, it's true that if one is used to more direct controls, it feels frustratingly complex, but this is a game from a time when precise control meant everything. It's not about finishing the game, it was about using this extra level of complexity in the controls to stay at the top of the high score board another day.

Plus, at the time it was pretty much either this, Space Invaders, or Scramble, so it had to set itself apart somehow. Considering its legacy, I think it succeeded. Funnily enough, Scramble is not nearly as well-recalled as Defender, even though it was essentially Gradius 0.1.

[wyatt]

I think the 80 million point thing is some kind of marathon where they get to play as long as they like. The tournement setting has much lower scores (but still impressive).

[Durhey]

Oh whoops, good catch.

Ahem, well, then consider that the highest score is around 230 THOUSAND points!

(Hey, the 7th place Defender score is only 18,875. I've scored more than that!)

[Ivo]

I think it makes much more sense that way. I reckon my opinion might have changed if I didn't drive, but the controls for defender are sort of like driving a car... ish.. haha. Have you ever tried a driving simulation with just one joy stick for acceleration and turning? (as in up & down accelerate and brake, left & right steer) It's a nightmare.

Guys, sorry but that doesn't seem to hold up under logic.
If a game is difficult because you can't control it, that is a flaw, not a feature.

Granted as historically Defender came out that way, the flawed controls have nostalgia, and give it some charisma... But praising crappy controls is beyond rose tinted glasses

There were already 2 comparisons to cars.

1. The one I quote above suggests that thrust+reverse makes more sense because it's like a car. Well, no it's not. In top down driving games you rotate the car in the plane and thrust for direction. If Defender played like Asteroid, then the Thrust thing would be ok, but Defender has up and down on the directions move the ship, not just point.

2. One I don't quote (should be just above my post though) compares the flawed controls to manual gears (in fact, incorrectly mentioned as "clutch"? I don't know much about cars but I'll elaborate below), as opposed to sensible controls which are unfairly compared to automatic gears. From the little I know about this, automatic gears truly don't let skilled drivers get the most performance (BTW I drive with manual, clutch gears, but I'm far from a "skilled" driver). The sensible controls I suggest let you do EVERYTHING you do with the flawed controls, just requiring less mental effort - which is then freed up for you to think of other things (like multi-tasking the scanner while you control the ship).

A fairer comparison of the proposed controls: Formula 1 drivers have manual gears, but don't use clutch (they have buttons on the wheel, and I believe they don't need to use a pedal to change). It's not automatic, which lets these truly skilled drivers handle better than any automatic setting would under the varied circumstances... Yet it's not "flawed" as it requires very little mental effort in order for them to do it, and lets them focus on stuff far more important than pressing the gear pedal in order to shift gears.

[Durhey]

*shrug*, well I liked them. I agree that for people used to 8-way joysticks, it probably seems bizarre and unnecessarily complex. Also I wouldn't want to use the control scheme with anything other than a 2-way joystick. With the original arcade joystick and buttons, it just feels good.

Defender without its unique control scheme just wouldn't be Defender. I don't think it's fair to call them flawed or crappy, as they were deliberately designed that way. They just don't work for you, Ivo, and that's fine. Control layouts are nearly the very definition of personal preference.

(Not to derail further, but non-automatic cars have a manual clutch. That's why they call it the clutch pedal.)

[Toad64]

As I was feeling too lazy to hook up my Atari, I was happy to see that the game is emulated really well on the Midway Arcade Classics collection. The game's actually more fun than I remembered it being, and definitely has that "just one more try" feel to it. Good choice for the start of Together Retro!

[Ivo]

I don't want to insult anyone that likes the classic controls. I'm not saying everyone should hate them, but people should really be able to see they are flawed (crappy is perhaps not adequate to describe them). I understand why they were used, as the arcade had a 2 way stick only. Anyway, I've said enough of the controls.

The game is very well designed as far as early arcade games go.
There is a natural urgency as you want to avoid mutants, but even when you have few landers left, you can't "milk" them for points by intentionally letting them pick up humans as you risk getting very tough enemies (Baiters) swarming you. On the other hand, just like Bubble Bobble (where you actually can't get rid of them), you don't need to kill them, and they vanish when you die. For the time it was made, the game has lots of depth. I also like that you don't auto-lose (regardless of how many lives you have) when all humans die. Usually arcade games have that sort of "slam tilt" thing (due to time out, often) which I don't appreciate - I guess here they knew they didn't need to put it in to keep people putting quarters in

Something I'd like to point out is the scoring system works in steps - getting that extra 10k is going to propel you much farther than otherwise as you get an extra bomb and an extra life (you will notice why there is a sudden jump in people's scores if they are above 30k). That is an interesting outcome of awarding so much every 10k (You start with 3 lives and 3 bombs, it's somewhat generous to give 1/3 of starting stuff in 10k, which with some practice is relatively easy - if you get to 30k, you essentially have "earned" what would traditionally be a continue - as you have got 3 more lives and 3 more bombs, but you keep the score, and had 2 of those lives and bombs available to use earlier!

EDIT: remembered something else I wanted to add - I think it is a flaw in the design of the game. You don't get better score for what would normally be considered good performance. This is most obvious in wave 1, where if you are very fast, you clear the wave without humans ever being even picked up, and score 3250, whereas if you (intentionally or not) kill aliens more slowly, you can get away with 4 or 5k without too much trouble by the extra score of the rescues! It reminds me of that (Sun Tzu) thing of generals that go to war and win it with lots of losses are heroes, but generals that avoid wars (with no losses) are at best not praised, and at worse considered cowards!

Ivo.

[thrashtronaut]

Ivo, I don't want to pick on your post, but you raise a couple interesting points about this game's design.

I honestly can't understand why the controls are viewed as flawed. Yes, they're unorthodox, but pinball machines aren't flawed because they don't have six inch long flippers. That's the design of the game. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat would be way easier with a standard GameCube controller instead of bongos. It's not designed that way. Controls are part of the ruleset of the game.

Also, as far as the scoring, you don't get a better score for what would normally be considered good performance by today's standards. Namely, quick level progression. Way back when, good performance was your score.

But, you also bring up an interesting point; if your aim is to get people to pump quarters in the machine, why reward them for taking their time in the current level?
Or am I just too cynical for my own good?

[Ivo]

I honestly can't understand why the controls are viewed as flawed. Yes, they're unorthodox, but pinball machines aren't flawed because they don't have six inch long flippers. That's the design of the game. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat would be way easier with a standard GameCube controller instead of bongos. It's not designed that way. Controls are part of the ruleset of the game.

Also, as far as the scoring, you don't get a better score for what would normally be considered good performance by today's standards. Namely, quick level progression. Way back when, good performance was your score.

But, you also bring up an interesting point; if your aim is to get people to pump quarters in the machine, why reward them for taking their time in the current level?
Or am I just too cynical for my own good?

By all means, this is a forum, so my posts can be discussed just as much as any other post!

The flipper length in a pinball machine is a feature of the design, and the whole table should take it into account. If you want to talk about flipper controls, then I'd say the controls would be flawed if, for example, in order to use the left flipper you have to constantly keep it down and release the button to make it go up, whereas the right flipper works in the standard way (this is a relatively good analogy for Defender's Reverse button and Thrust, as the Thrust of the arcade machine is to the right of the vertical controls - so going left is always a bit counter-intuitive, even in the arcade).

I haven't played the DK drum game, but I'm not so sure controlling without the bongos is easier - it would be an entirely different thing for sure, so the comparison isn't (IMO) as valid. I'm pretty sure (even without trying) that you CAN do stuff with the bongos that you CAN'T do in controllers.

As for the other issue, score is the measure of performance use, not the "performance" itself. I was sawing the measure is, in this particular case, not entirely correlated with performance. So you can get better score playing worse / with less skill, and in that sense the measure isn't perfect (it's pretty good though, particularly for the time - rescuing the humans isn't easy and deserves a bonus; and the situation that I refer to only realistically occurs in wave 1, but anyway I think it would make sense you'd get a special bonus if no humans got picked up by the end of the wave - call it a flawless victory bonus).

Also, you are not being cynical. It's no secret that arcade games difficulty and often used "time-out" mechanics were designed to keep profits up. How many arcade games don't have either straight "timers", forced progression (e.g. rail shooters, auto-scrolling shmups), or some "Hurry up!" special baddie that shows up when you are taking your time?

Ivo.

[bobbynewmarkiii]

Further to my post regarding problems with the PSP version...
You need to make one save manually before auto save will work.
Following this I have been able to reconfigure the controls and have a sweet original style control setup with thrust and reverse on the shoullder buttons, up and down on D-pad etc. Nice and authentic, but my scores are now worse than Racketboy's