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Earth Defender is developer Carlos Pérez Peregrin's first ever game on an Amstrad CPC. It uses the CPC's, 80 column, Mode 2 graphics display. Quite rare to see this being used in a shoot 'em up style game, normally mode 2 is used for text adventure gaming or in word processor and other serious applications. Earth Defender is inspired and based on the book, Ender's Game, written by Orson Scott Card.

The year is 2070. The International Outer Space Organism has detected a serious menace. Some galaxies away, an enemy fleet of Insectors is coming towards our planet. Earth's only solution is to train gifted children to become the next soldiers in this future war. You are one of the few that have been specially selected.

Once you have read the cool introductory "how to play" cut-scenes, you are straight into the action. You have a fine looking Spaceship, not quite wireframe, not quite filled in, but all cool in two colour glory for sure. Your goal is to shoot everything you see on the screen. To do this you fly around the one screen getting closer to your enemy. Your enemies will be above or below your ship, you won't be able to hit them unless you reach the same plane as they are.

To see how close you are to your enemies with the press of the fire button you can switch you view from vertical to horizontal. This will show you the distance you are between your enemy. The enemies will either be huge or small this is how you work out how close or how far away you are from them. When you see you are the correct distance, don't waste time, press the fire button and shoot your laser at them to destroy them. Once you have cleared thescreen of all enemies you move to the next level.

There are six levels in total. Level one: The beginning of your training, learn to move your ship and clear the screen of the one and static enemy, Meteor's (yes you can still crash and die on this level too). Level two: Shoot down moving giant wasps. They don't shoot at firs, but once you have killed off a few of them, they will make life difficult shooting at you. Your timing of switching views becomes fraught with great danger, because if you are not paying attention to enemy bullets whizzing from one side of the screen to the other you will find yourself killed quite unexpectedly. Level three: Master your movement skills through the narrow paths. No shooting or enemy here, just navigate through the narrow tunnel and switch views when required to make it to the end. Level's four and five are basically a mash up of levels one and two, however the game is no longer black and white but blue and yellow. Finally, on level six you get the opportunity to destroy your enemy once and for all as you encounter the end of game boss.

Two colour mode 2 graphics worked beautifully. Sprites were large and absorbing in the context of the gameplay. While sound is not exactly what you would call "blast your ears off brilliant", they were eerie and dark, it served the purpose of making the game atmospherically space orientated. The technique of switching views was innovative and creative. Identifying the distance you needed to be to shoot your enemy down increased my interest in the gameplay.

Gameplay can be frustrating at times. You think you are at the correct distance to swap your view and take out the enemy but this is not always the case, this was a major frustration for me and predominantly occurs with the wasp sections as they constantly change their size. Another frustration of switching views was being killed by a wasp or bullet as it landed on you as soon as you chose to switch views.

For a first time homebrew game on the CPC for this developer, it's such a cool idea and very well executed. Who knew playing a CPC game with two colours was better than playing a game in 4 colour mode 1, that would often look like a speccy port. Earth Defender breaks the myth that you can't use mode 2 for any CPC games other than text adventures and developers should explore this more in the future, I hope they will. Carlos entered the game into the 8-BIT ANNUAL DEV contest and he made a number of changes to the game from the original #cpcretrodev entry. To see those images please go to the 8-Bit Annual Dev section to find out more.