Defend is an arcade game written in BASIC except for two machine language subroutines: 1 reads the joystick a little faster than BASIC normally does, and the second scrolls the terrain at the bottom of the screen. As both the name of the game and some of your opponent's graphics hint at, the game is very loosely based with the arcade hit Defender, but only in some graphics, side scrolling and shooting opponents. There are no humans to rescue, no radar or smart bombs, and you constant fly to the right.
Using the left joystick (and this is used in analog fashion - your position on the screen is based on the position of the joystick rather than a digital style move up or down) the player can travel most of the vertical range of the play area and has limited horizontal movement as well. While the game supports rapid fire, your ship will NOT move if you are constantly firing, so you have let go of the fire button to move your ship. Enemy ships (there are 6 kinds) vary in score depending on how far from them you are when you shoot the them; the further away you are, the more points you get. If a ship passes you on the left and goes off the screen, you LOSE points instead. A collision with an enemy (or being shot by them) causes the player to lose one of his 3 ships. The game keeps track of the high score and the players 3 initials for each session as well.
The game makes good use of BASIC for sound effects, and the ML routine that scrolls the mountains at the bottom makes the game look and play much better than if it didn't. It's a little slow uploading your score, and only one enemy appears on the screen at a time. Like Defender, there are waves to complete and the enemies start moving more erratically and fire more often as you go from wave to wave. Not a bad game at all for BASIC and being from a tape magnazine. The game supports the Coco 1/2 high speed POKE, but it still plays quite well without it.
Title: Defend
Author: Tony Naseef
Publisher: T&D issue #8
Released: February 1983
Requires: Color Computer 1,2 or 3, Extended BASIC, 16K RAM (cassette), 32K RAM (disk), joystick