Earth Defense Forces 2 Portable - PSP

[prinnysquad]

Just another little update that hardly anyone will read

Cracked on into the meat of the co-op campaign last night with a short session. We tackled the level with the

->Open Spoiler<-

giant centipede

and the one where the

->Open Spoiler<-

singularity opens in the sky and the mothership unfolds

.

It looked surprisingly good on the little screens. Framerate was down to single figures on a few occasions, but that gave me time to appreciate the visuals more closely. They really haven't reduced the scale of the ps2 original! The draw distance for little ufos buzzing around the sky isn't as good, but you can see them with a zoom. The size and design of the stock insects and enemies, even on this machine, look so more epic than the designs of the American game due out shortly. I never thought the scale of edf2 would translate so well to the psp, but in co-op it's just excellent to play, and still a thrill.

Can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but Sandlot have made a change which is maybe based on an upcoming Insect Armageddon feature. In co-op, if your mate dies (and it's always vanpeebles, the useless tosser) then you can run up to them and press SELECT. This revives them and gives them a bit of energy. However, the punishment for your friend's ineptitude is that the rescuer's health is halved. It's a handy feature, though, especially when there's some health packs knocking around for both of you to grab.

[prinnysquad]

Little bit of a difficulty spike last night, something like mission 67. A new mission featuring silver spiders, who are double hard basts.

There was 4 or 5 nests around the city, so we swept around in an arc taking them out one at a time - only 6 or 7 spiders were guarding each one, but their webbing proper hammered your health.

After destroying the last one, a new, slightly bigger nest appeared in the centre of town under that big tower. It was spewing out silver spiders 6 at a time, whether you'd killed the last lot or not. The nest itself was reinforced and taking a MASSIVE amount of punishment.

First go, I got sneak-attacked off a spider and got killed. Vanparps tried valiantly to take down the nest but got overran. Next go, fully tooled up with assualt rifles and shotguns, we both went for the nest, but soon got mobbed by two dozen spiders. It was infuriating - you could kill them from a little distance, but health was so fragile that you couldn't go forward to gain the pick ups! It meant he died, with about ten spiders still lurking around, and the nest still spewing more out. I went for broke and managed to hit the nest close-up. It went down. The remaining spiders powered after me, and I scurried between buildings to avoid them. My health was about 200, but every time I saw health, I'd approach it and a couple of spiders would flank me and cut me off from the pick-up! I resorting to taking them down while running for cover. And just made it. Really intense, deceptively tough mission, that one.

[prinnysquad]

Finished on co-op normal. The new ants and new spiders are tough as old nipples.

Epicness all round though, with some inventive tactics required for the mission in the ruined cityscape with three towering nests looming in the distance. Various things come to skank you - ufos, normal ants, tough new ants, tough new spiders, some walkers and flying ants. The nests replace the **** you kill, so had to be taken down asap. The winning tactics on that mission required sticking together up to certain point, then splitting up, as one drew the majority of the fire while the other ran in a huge rectangular sweep firing entirely at the nests, sprinting Benny Hill-style away from the pursuing raggers.

Another mission against a load of hyper-sized ants/spiders involved one player distracting fire by flying around in a chopper while the other blasted away from range. Of course, there's no tactics involved in a simpleton's game like EDF.

[Colin]

Will this be seeing an English language release anywhere?

[hush]

I do hope so i would really like to get it

[prinnysquad]

All the others have. But it's on psp, so maybe not. TBH, other than the weapons being unreadable, the Japanese version is no issue at all.

[Neon Ignition]

I've only done the first level but first impression was that this is awful. EDF games aren't exactly lookers but this is poor even by early PS2 standards where you just have a mass of polygons filling the screen when things get busy and the PSP's controls are ill suited to the job too. Not a patch on the console editions

[prinnysquad]

First level, pfft. The controls are easy enough to get used to, yet always limited. There's a certain setting that lets you use the stick for movement and the face buttons for reticule up/down/left/right, with the right shoulder being fire and the left being jump.

The visuals become slightly sparser to let it run similar to the ps2 version. The ps2 version first level had horrific slowdown, and masses of polygons as the people, enemies and architecture filled the screen. Your memory must be fail. On most levels this one does a good job of presenting scale.

[vanpeebles]

Agreed, the default control scheme isn't the best with better choices but the gfx are ok. What they loose in detail they make up for in speed and performance. View distance is still good with slight fogging.

Also the two player wireless coop is superb.