BEFRIENDER

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Defender, with the sides swapped.

In 1980 Williams put you in the ship and made you save the humanoids. Here you are the thing that comes down out of the sky, and the ship is what turns up to stop you.

WHAT YOU ARE

You land as a Lander. Three legs, no gun, no flight, and a planet full of people who run indoors the moment they see you.

Reach out and take one and you seal into a cocoon for five seconds. What

comes out can fly, shoot in sixteen directions, and pick a humanoid up and carry it away.

Out-feed your own brood on a planet and you evolve again. Fail and they evolve without you and you watch your family get better at this than you are.

THE PLANET

It is a cylinder. Fly far enough in one direction and you come back round to where you started, and the top of the screen carries the old Defender scanner so you can see the whole world at once.

Towns shoot back, and how they shoot is the puzzle. A city block points its flak straight up. A bunker sweeps the ground. So each has a way in that beats it — walk under the block, come over the top of the bunker — and you cannot be safe from both at once. Missile Defense racks have no such angle: they launch something that turns and follows, and it is the one piece of enemy fire in the game you can shoot out of the air.

Anyone who runs into a bunker comes back out with a gun and stops running. They are the best enemy on the ground and they are worth the most.

The mothership banks everything the brood takes and burns it to jump to the next world. Run out of biomass in deep space and that is where the run ends.Nobody shot you. You just didn't eat enough.

CONTROLS

  Move ................ left stick / arrow keys

  Fire ................ A, RB / space

  Fire any direction .. right stick        (Mutant and above)

  Grab ................ X / G              (a lunge — it reaches)

  Spores .............. B / E              (bought between worlds)

  Zoom ................ triggers / mouse wheel

  Tuning panel ........ TAB

Plays on pad or keyboard. Composed for 16:9.

CREDITS

A tribute to DEFENDER, Williams Electronics, 1980, by Eugene Jarvis, Larry

DeMar, Sam Dicker and Paul Dussault. They built the planet, the humanoids,

and the ship that came to save them. This is their game with the sides swapped.

Made by Derrick Moore / Castle Shannon. Unity 6.