When I first read that this game was in development I got very exited because I was a huge fan of the original. I put countless quarters in the arcade when I was a kid and at the time it was the most impressive graphics I had ever seen. Then I got the home version for the Atari 5200 and not only was it a near perfect translation but it was actually more fun. So I had very high expectations for the 2002 version. I read some of the online reviews before I purchased the game and decided to rent first. I'm glad I did. The concept of picking up stranded colonists remains, but little else from the original does. Actually this game reminds me more Jedi Starfighter than the original defender. First of all you can only carry 3 colonists at a time which i very irritating. The original allowed you to rescue falling people and stack them up for big bonuses and at no time did you pick them up off the ground. In this version you have to pick them up off the ground and the planet does not blow up if you lose them. The excitement from the original came from so many landers grabbing people up and you had to frantically get to them before they reached the top. In the new one landers do pickup people occasionally but have lots of other jobs to do like blow up bridges, tanks,missile silos and drop zones where you take rescued colonists etc. The end result is that you'll find yourself running all over the place trying to prevent one thing from going wrong or the game is over. Be prepared to start over many times until you get it right. It is fun and frustrating at the same time. The controls are difficult to master because you're mainly using all 4 top buttons on the controller. I would have rather used both joysticks instead but the game does not give that option. The graphics look more Dreamcast than PS2 and sometimes it was difficult to find objects without pointer arrows. Fortunately you can use the d-pad to make your HUD display pointer arrows on enemies,colonists and objectives but sometimes this didn't work at all. There's really no way of telling how many colonists there are left to rescue except when the pointer arrows stop working but I noticed that sometimes they would stop working unless I got close to some colonists so some colonists would die before I knew they existed. The game is exciting and there are some good strategy elements like placing missiles and tanks and rescuing colonists will give you power-ups like health, tanks, missiles and more. There is a lot of activity with no slowdown which is a plus because I like chaos in games. In the end I liked Defender and it is a worthwhile rental but an experienced gamer like myself will beat the game in 8 to 10 hours or less and it really still can't beat the adictiveness of the classic original which was probably about 512K in size.
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