#33: Super E.D.F.: Earth Defense Force

If you're going to stick the whole thing in the title, why have an acronym too?

We've hit another game I'd never played before, or even heard of! I recognize the company name solely from Super Bases Loaded which was fine but unspectacular. What is this game, and would it do any better?

It's only logical.

Well, the first thing I got to do is choose a weapon and there's a terrible graphic of a ship being held in place by a couple of robot arms, so this is probably a side scrolling shooter. That's quite a variety of weapons and it's a little sad that I'll probably only get to have one of them at a time. Maybe power-ups will give the rest?

Yep, definitely a side scrolling shooter, but one with no power-ups to collect. The weapon you choose is what you've got until you die. On the plus side you only have 3 health points and no extra lives so you're going to die in a real hurry. Especially if you make the mistake of choosing a weapon that only shoots forward, like the vulcan. The second wave of enemies comes from above! And covers the entire screen! And repeats seconds later! I honestly can't see how someone who chose the vulcan weapon doesn't lose 2 of their 3 health almost instantly. My second choice was the homing missiles which worked exactly as advertised. I no longer had to worry about trying to hit enemies and just had to worry about dodging bullets. Which worked fine until I made it to the boss who covered the screen in lines of bullets. I bet if you knew the pattern you could pre-plan your dodges, but I didn't so I couldn't. And when I died I was forced to restart from the beginning.

Oh, and the game has lag issues when there's lots of bullets on the screen like pretty much every shooter on the SNES thus far.

The game had three buttons, but I honestly couldn't tell you what one of them did. The other one toggled your ship between being terrible and being awesome so you only hit it once. At least it had auto-fire so I just had to hold the shoot button down.

There've been a lot of medicore to bad shooters thus far, and this one definitely falls on the bad side of things. I didn't miss anything as a kid by not playing this game.

Rating: F+