A review of Defendguin

Defendguin is an open source clone of old arcade Defender remade using a Linux theme and available for various operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Risc OS, QNX) and even for some game consoles.

Whoever played Defender many years ago will be immediately comfortable with this new version of the game revisited concerning some characters but unchanged in the rules. The game starts by default in a window but lanunching it with the -f parameter it's possible to start it in full screen mode.

The goal of the game is still to protect the inhabitants of a planet, who in this case are penguins, from the attack of enemies who look like the Borg version of Bill Gates and want to capture the penguins to turn them into hideous mutants who will attack the player and can be recognized by their purple color.

If all the penguin should be mutated or killed the planet would explode and the player would face only mutants. Luckily in the worst case scenario the planet comes back every five levels.

Another problem is given by different kinds of mines, some of which dropped by enemy bombers: obviously the player must avoid them during navigation and possibly destroy them, especially a particularly insidious kind that follows the player popping out from behind his back at any moment..

Being a shoot-em-up, in Defendguin the player must shoot like crazy but this is also e dexterity game because the player must keep ready to rescue penguins in danger and take them from the enemy's grasp before it's too late if they've already been captured. When an enemy captures a penguin it must lift it up to the top of the screen and only at that point it gets mutated so when a penguin gets captured and screeches to ask for help there's still some time to save it.

In the top part of the screen there's a sort of radar that shows the position of penguins and enemies throughout the playable zone and it's useful when the player needs to see where is a penguin in danger to run to the rescue.

It's possible to shoot the emeny that captured a penguin aiming carefully to kill the enemy only: now if the penguin was just captured and it's just above the ground it can fall with no harm otherwise the player needs to catch it and bring it down to the ground to avoid a deadly fall.

Linux users will probably find Defendguin in their distribution repositories or even already available if during the operating system installation they chose to install the games, for the distributions that don't include it and for the other operating systems it's possible to download Defendguin from the author's home page.

Being a good old arcade, Defendguin has a few simple rules to assimilate (considering the nature of the enemies it's the perfect way to put it!), graphics and sounds simple but well produced. For arcade lovers, for whoever is amused by the game's theme and for whoever wants to have some simple fun this version of the old game Defender is perfect.