The Last Game You’ll Ever Need to Buy

After doing some outside work for a local business this week, I had some extra money, so I took the plunge and bought Halo 3. Clearly, I’ve been seduced by aggressive, non-stop marketing and bad soda.

So far, I’d say it’s been a solid investment. Great graphics, new weapons, and the ineffable Warthog has come back for another run. However, I think many will agree with me when I say that something is missing from Halo 3. It is, after all, the same mix of aliens, shooting, shooting aliens, driving, and driving over aliens while shooting them that we’ve been playing for nearly six years now.

Again, this isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying it, because I am. Bungie has put three years and countless bucks into developing a fun shooter, and the Havok physics engine adds an additional cinematic layer to the experience, but to call Halo 3 “revolutionary” would be an overstatement.

I hate to tell you this, Bungie, but eventually the novelty of sticking your foes with plasma grenades wears off.

Oh, how my exploits fighting Elite in the jungles of “New Mombassa” make me yearn for something a little more refreshing, and a little less complicated. When I was a kid, for instance, we didn’t have a washing machine, and my mom would take me with her to the laundromat to get the wash done; she’d always give me a few quarters to play the Ms. Pac-Man machine while we waited, and if this sounds familiar to you, that’s because there’s a Ms. Pac-Man machine in every goddamn laundromat in the United States. Everyone loves Ms. Pac-Man. Why? It’s simple, and has a strong female lead.

And that’s just the point; all you need to play Ms. Pac-Man is a joystick. To play Halo 3, you need to be able to coordinate your hands to touch like 9000 different buttons at the same time, and teaching new people how to play ends up being a huge clusterfuck. Once, I tried to teach my grandmother how to play Call of Duty 2, and it was like trying to teach linear algebra to an infant. It’s hard to be good when you can’t remember the difference between the “reload” and “throw grenade” buttons.

Is there no game out there that encompasses the simple, mindless fun of Ms. Pac-Man with today’s next-generation gaming hardware?

Luckily for all of us, this game exists. One Japanese budget game studio has single-handedly figured out a way to create the Mother Theresa of video games. This game has it all. Just when you think “holy shit there is just no possible way this game could get any better,” it does, and it’s only $40 brand new. Did I mention the control scheme? Run, aim, jump, and shoot. FOUR BUTTONS. It’s so simple, you could play this brilliant diamond of gamedom after a couple of Long Island Iced Teas.

I speak, of course, of none other than the legendary Earth Defense Force: 2017, for Xbox 360.

If you have an Xbox 360, and you have $40, your task is to go buy this game. Buy it right now. In fact, here’s a handy link to Amazon so you can order it online, right fucking now. Aren’t I a sweetheart?

http://www.amazon.com/D3-Publisher-Earth-Defense-Force/dp/B000LV9N8S/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2786087-4684920?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1191185643&sr=8-1

This game has it all folks. Let’s start with the premise: aliens are invading Earth, and you must defend the planet as a high-level member of an international organization that nobody has ever heard of. By now, you should already know it’s going to be awesome. They did the same thing with the Halo series, and look how far it has come. Think of all the incredible movies about alien invasion: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Planet of the Vampires, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, I could go on and on.

These aren’t just any old aliens, though. Oh no. By a completely unexplained fluke of the universe, the aliens are enormous versions of common household insects, and they have an insatiable appetite for humanity. And there are a lot of them, a whole lot of them. You’ve all seen Starship Troopers; think that number, and double it. In fact, if you’re not screaming “JESUS H CHRIST, THAT IS A FUCKTON OF BUGS” at your television set, there’s something wrong with you.

Take a look at the radar display on the top right of that screenshot. All of the red dots are the bugs. When you think you’ve killed them all, alien dropships drop more of them on top of you. Sometimes they just show up out of nowhere. Maybe they can teleport, maybe they can rip holes in time and space, maybe they are coming in through an alternate dimension. I don’t care. I don’t even really care that the graphics suck because the game is trying to draw a shitton of bugs at any given time; all I know is that SOMEHOW, SOMEWHERE, THEY JUST KEEP COMING.

This must already seem like a worthwhile investment to you, but I encourage you to read on while you wait for Fedex to come to your door with a helicopter because you needed this game so badly. If you’re still unconvinced, let me further persuade you.

See, right after fighting several rounds of gigantic ants and spiders, the aliens decide to throw their gigantic army of robots to stop your attempts at protecting Earth, and clearly these robots are filled with kerosene under all of that heavy armor, because every single one of them erupts in an explosion that would satisfy even the pickiest of pyrotechnics. Additionally, the aliens have made the explosions SO ADVANCED that you take absolutely no damage when you are near one. How’s that for efficiency?

You’re probably thinking “well, it must be difficult to conserve ammo if you’re shooting all of these gigantic bugs and robots all of the time.” Well clearly the game developers were working so hard on making the battles of epic proportions that they forgot to limit the amount of in-game ammo. That’s right: UNLIMITED AMMUNITION. You can’t even get that with cheats anymore, and this game just gives it to you.

You’re probably thinking “well, if you’re killing all of these bugs and robots all of the time, it must be difficult to get around their corpses.” Again, the developers have gone out of their way to help you, the player, in this respect, as bugs simply inexplicably disappear from the game entirely, shortly after their deaths.

You’re probably thinking “well, it must be hard to kill all of these bugs and robots all of the time if they’re crawling all over city highrises.” While it’s true that the bugs crawl all over the buildings in the city, and do absolutely no damage to them, YOU can take out the buildings and the bugs which crawl on top of them in a single hit! I’d say the fact that you end up causing far, far more destruction to the cities than the bugs and robots is irrelevant when you are trying to protect Earth.

IT GETS EVEN BETTER. Just when you thought you’d seen it all, the aliens decide to spawn a gigantic, fire-breathing Mecha-Godzilla clone to put a final stop to your defensive shenanigans.

By now, you’re practically jumping up and down in amazement. For the sake of the length of this ridiculously long post, however, let’s do a quick recap of Earth Defense Force: 2017.

- Giant Bug Army
- Unlimited Ammo
- Robots
- No Discernible Storyline
- Destructible Environments
- Rockets
- Mecha Godzilla
- Cooperative Play

One more thing: the game has an adjustable difficulty. The levels range from “Easy,” which is really, really easy, and the hardest difficultly level, appropriately named “INFERNO.”

If that wasn’t the icing on the cake, I don’t know what is.