“Some sort of very huge bug”
Fat Conan is a fan of B-movies, he has been since he was young barbarian watching late-night channel 4 on a black and white telly. There was a time when that channel showed dreadful classic after dreadful classic and many a Saturday morning was met in the presence Godzilla, dome headed aliens or deadly creatures from the depths. In his early twenties FC encountered a pair of classics that would outshine those that came before them in just about every aspect of cinematic failure. This pairing was 1977’s “Damnation Alley” and 1992 TV movie “Steel Justice“, true masterpieces of the genre, whatever genre that may be. Needless to say FC loved them both.
These films are enjoyable simply for the fact that they are so preposterously bad that there’s nothing you can do but stare at them and grin. You’re laughing at them, not with them, but you’re still laughing and laughing hard. There are so many inadvertently hilarious moments in both films: the poorly superimposed scorpions ‘mauling’ what is clearly a mannequin; the deadly cockroach swarm that makes no attempt to hide the fact that it consists of a few plastic insects glued to a sheet; the touching moment when a mourning father realises the soul of his late son has possessed a truck-o-saurus (I shit you not). With this in mind, it might be clear why FC liked “Earth Defense Force 2017” on the 360 so much.
As far as cheap productions go, the don’t come much cheaper than EDF. It has a clunky interface that abandons logic when you have two controllers activated, it has some terrible voice acting that triggers randomly throughout the missions and it has graphics that, while not being offensive (in fact, they’re rather enjoyable to witness), contain throwbacks to the days of Blake Stone and its ilk, with their great big sprites and cheesy feel. EDF lacks the spit, polish and plastic bump-mapping we’ve come to expect in a modern games. What it does have are ants, humungous ants and lots of them. It has them running down roads. It has them crawling over buildings. It even has them dropping from spaceships (incidentally from a height that tends to cause the first few to explode in clouds of green goo on impact, forming a cushion for the remainder).
It also has a city, a city that is very much under attack from the aforementioned ants. A city which is highly destructible, on a scale FC hadn’t seen since “Syndicate Wars” way back in the iron age.
The icing on the cake however, is that in parallel with the giant ants (that burst in clouds of green goo), and the city (which is highly destructible) there’s a man (or two men in co-op mode) that has a rocket launcher capable of destroying ants and city alike and that comes supplied with an infinite crate of ammunition.
If you we’re looking for a quick recipe for fun, I’m sure those ingredients would be listed somewhere, and if they weren’t they sure as hell should have been. It’s brilliant, as simple as that. What it lacks in budget it more than makes up for in popping insects, inane chatter and fantastic b-movie charm. FC wasn’t able to tell if he was laughing at it or with it, but he was laughing and laughing hard.
A great big daft shooter full of mad action, with an enormously silly and endlessly quotable script out of 10.