

“ Under Defeat” shows how far the genre has grown since “Spacewar!” It’s like a beefed-up “1942” with enemies constantly spiraling toward your chopper, as tanks and giant battleships attack you from the beautiful and elaborate environments below. It’s available exclusively for the PlayStation 3, and any shoot-’em-up fan with that console should seek the game out. The top-notch helicopter-based shooter never made it to America until it was remade in HD form. Twenty-five years passed between “Defender” and “Under Defeat,” a Japanese shoot-’em-up originally released in 2005.
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If you don’t like shoot-’em-ups, “Arcade Origins” also features more than two dozen other classic arcade games, including the timeless “Robotron: 2084” and “Spy Hunter.” It’s a similar package to the “Midway Arcade Treasures” series released for the last generation of consoles in 2003, so you may not need to upgrade if you’re still content playing those on your PlayStation 2 or GameCube. Other shooters in “Arcade Origins” include “Defender 2,” the mediocre “Galaga” clone “Satan’s Hollow,” and the terrific and terrifying “Sinistar,” whose demonic talking satellite is still the scariest character in video games. With its quickly escalating difficulty and twin goals of destroying enemy ships and saving civilians from the cities below, “Defender” makes the first-person shooters of today feel like a cakewalk. “Defender” looks rudimentary today, but it’s still challenging and addictive.

Midway’s contributions to the genre included “Defender,” one of the most popular games of the era, and one of some 30 classics featured in “Arcade Origins.” “ Midway Arcade Origins” takes us back to the arcades of the 1980s, where such shooters as “Galaga” and “1942” ruled. Two recent releases remind us how fun shoot-’em-ups can be. It kicked off the long history of the shoot-’em-up, a once popular genre that gradually retreated to the sidelines. Finished in 1962 by three MIT grad students, “Spacewar!” is a two-player duel played on a computer as big as a fridge, with two ships flying around in space shooting at each other. 2012 marked the 50th birthday of “Spacewar!,” one of the first computer games ever made.
