Sgathaich: Super Earth Defense Force

By sgathaich0 on November 27, 2019

Going to apologise if this one seems a little less in depth as I have big plans brewing for next month, plus Pokémon came out and oh boy lots to talk about that… next year… cause already got December filled.

When I was a child we often had arcades, with arcade machines. There were 2 kinds of games most common at these. Beat em ups and side scrolling shooters. As consoles advanced it was natural to try and bring these over to them (although that meant they couldn’t abuse difficulty to force coins out of children’s pockets).

Released in the early 90s Super Earth Defense Force is a part of the arcade game Earth Defense Force. Sacrifices had to be made for the adaption namely a second player option however features like selectable weapons were added to it.

The game plays much like a classic side scrolled shooter. You’re in a space ship that’s constantly going forward but you can move forward, backward, up and down. You start with 3 shields with the ability to increase it by picking up power ups. Similarly you upgrade your weapons by gaining power ups which includes additional drone fighters that you can set to attack in certain ways such as staying by your side to give you a larger blast radius or just out right homing in on the enemy while you are avoiding them (that one requires quite a bit of levelling up though). Lose all your shields and you’re dead, lose all your continues and it’s a game over. Standard arcade affair.

The game is fairly simple to play, get to the end of the level alive and kill the boss, do this by killing enemies avoiding getting hit, get power ups to help kill enemies so on and so on. It makes it a fairly simple pick up and play game. I didn’t play it back in the day since I didn’t own it, I was a wee bairn during the SNES days but it was my first console. I played this shortly after SNES games were announced coming to the Switch through its online service. Thanks to that I was able to rewind the game if I ever died as… yeah the game gets quite hard late on. In fact remember that level up where I mentioned that you could send your drones to attack the target leaving you to avoid attacks? Well one of the final bosses is designed to make that unusable against them. Plus on the very final boss, no matter what I did I could not avoid getting hit even with using rewinding time.

The game is fairly short so it’s a fun wee distraction assuming you don’t find the later difficulty too hair pulling out-ish.

Well there we go, sorry there wasn’t much to talk about, I had to catch up on a lot of things, finished off some shows I will review in the coming year and a whole bunch of games. Well some of you may remember I did a series in October, during it I did mention how Christmas kept encroaching on Halloween, so how about we make December a little, or should I say very largely monster-ous.

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