I first encountered EDF back in the day. It was maybe around 2003/4? VP had bought the HD advance 3.0 and installed a harddrive in his PS2. He’s downloaded a load of .iso files on emule or something. One of them was called The Chikyuu Boueigun, a Simple 2000 release in Japan. We thought it would be gash. We were wrong.
‘Play this game. It’s mad. You’ll love it.’ He said. I was sceptical. It looked... basic. Technically poor. But, split screen co-op. That’s a tick in the positives box.
We started it. Those ants are huge! Wow! Then the buildings collapsing. Then the UFOs. The red ants. OMG OMG! The tripod walkers! OMG! This was amazing. The text and dialogue was in Japanese, but we loved it. It was amazing. Carnage and pure, yet subtly tactical, gameplay.
And that was it. Until... I’d just started a teaching job in 2004 in the sunny provincial outpost of Spennymoor. One day I entered the local goods boutique (Asda) and looked around the **** Games stands. You know, those cuboid ones with the four faces, where shops used to hide the games they hoped naive 8 year olds would con their parents into buying, because they were a fiver.
I picked up various cheap budget crap. ‘What’s that? Monster Attack? That looks gash,’ I said to myself. I spoke to myself a lot back then. The locals were illiterate.
The pictures on the back betrayed its true content. *Internal monologue* ‘wait a minute. That looks familiar. Oh my god, it’s that game! In English!’
A fiver. That’s all it took. A fiver and an odyssey was started. I took it to VPs house and he too was astonished that such a niche, cheap Japanese title had been released over here. He ripped it to the harddrive and we were away.
We didn’t think there’d be a sequel. Simple 2000 games don’t have a sequel, do they?
Then it appeared. the Chikyuu Boueigun 2. It was a cause of celebration. Excitement. Jizz. Lots and lots of jizz. Spider jizz, specifically.
Yes, EDF2 was the game that threw the kitchen sink at the series. We had never seen anything like it. Just when you thought it was done with new enemies, more appeared.
Now, my memory may be hazy, but I seem to recall:
black ants
Red ants
Purple ufos
Red ufos
Mirror ufos (why haven’t these returned?)
Bomber ufos
Ladybirds
Spiders
Flying ants
HUGE ants
A MASSIVE centipede
Big kaiju
Gigantic Kaiju!
Dropships
Standard tripods
War of the Worlds Deroys
Our jaws hit the floor. It also had a ludicrous amount of levels. 70/80 odd maybe? Compared to about 25 in the first game. The core gameplay remained the same, to our liking. Split screen, with the addition of a wing diver character. The same mix of blasting and tactical nuance.
That’s the thing with EDF. Halfwits say it’s one dimensional, point and shoot dumbass gameplay. It really isn’t. Try doing that on Inferno. It just doesn’t cut the mustard. The arenas are huge, and need to be used wisely. Weapon choices need to be carefully considered. Whether or not to flatten buildings to funnel enemies/ create a line of sight needs to be considered. Even which goddamn dropship to hit first needs to be carefully considered. This isn’t a series of stupid simplicity. It’s a series of depth, tactical complexity and challenge.
This is a triumph of a game. The frame rate slowed to 1 frame a second on occasion, but it didn’t matter. It was shared nirvana. A B-movie style inside top rank co-op gameplay.
The centipede is my favourite enemy of the series. It is epically huge - wrapping itself around the buildings and going on forever. Striking it causes it to fracture into separate pieces. The individual segments have sinister cyclopic eyes that follow you around the screen. It is astonishing. I’d never seen anything so large on screen since a John Holmes movie.
EDF sometimes gets a bad rap for its visuals, but EDF2 had some truly amazing effects. The mission where you take out two mini kaiju, then all goes quiet. Stomp stomp. The screen shakes. You look up. The biggest kaiju youve ever seen! On another mission, after an initial clearance of standard scout ants, there’s a bizarre black portal with electricity crackling around it. Suddenly, it unfolds to open a mothership out to take up the WHOLE SKY. It’s a brilliant, underrated effect. That mothership is my favourite EDF end of game boss, still.
And the physics? The bits of ants flying off into the atmosphere is HILARIOUS and massively satisfying. It’s a game, for God’s sake. Enjoy the absurdity.
After it’s release and our joy playing it, I was hungry for another conversion.
I emailed Sandlot:
re, Vol 81
Hello,
I thought you might like to know that 'Vol.81: THE CHIKYUU BOUEIGUN 2' is one of the best games that I have played in recent years. Your development team has made some excellent changes to the first game. In particular, the alien monsterdesigns are superb. I thank you for creating such a cheap, quality game! I hope a Western publisher manages to negotiate its release in the PAL region, soI can understand the names of the levels and weapons! I'm certainly looking forward to the next-generation console version.
Yours, Prinnysquad (May not be real name)
And delighted in the response:
Thank you for the rooting. My best regards in the future because of holding out along expecting it.
The arrival of the next generation of consoles presented new potentials for the series.
Obviously, Sandlot would release a third game on the PS3, right? Wrong. In a sidestep I didn’t see, they announced that CB3 would be released on the 360.
It was ok, though. I’d already thrown my lot in with Microsoft thanks to Oblivion and Import Tuner Challenge.
And so it arrived. EDF3. Or EDF2017, as it was called in the UK.
What did I expect after EDF2?
more levels
More baddies
More
More
More
Online co-op
What did we get?
less levels
Less variety in levels
Less variety in enemies
Less playable characters
No online co-op
Wait, what? You’re riding the crest of a wave. You have more horsepower. Maybe a bigger budget. A wider audience. Sandlot, what the hell are you doing? Why strip everything back? Why? Just... why????
It didn’t make sense to me. Now do not misunderstand me. I loved the game. The framerate was better. The visuals had a wonderful chrome shine to them. The ants looked amazing. The explosions superb. The new robots looked great.
But why cut things back? This was an opportunity. An opportunity to do more, better. It was more like EDF 2.5.
It can be argued that they were going to find a larger audience with this game, especially in the US, so maybe it was important to focus on getting the engine polished. Most new players wouldn’t know about the past titles in all of their rugged glory. Maybe the budget couldn’t stretch to a stable netcode.
I remember arguing with a bloke on this forum at the time about it. He was a nice guy and a true fan of the series, but we wanted different things. He thought EDF2 over-egged the pudding, whereas I thought it was one of the greatest and most ambitious titles ever. He wanted less, better. I wanted more, better. In retrospect, I can see his point, in a way. But the lack of variety and ambition still irks.
On the positive side, EDF2017 was a remarkable experience. The new robots were great, with flailing arms and absurdly huge guns. The mobile fortress made for some intensely atmospheric missions.
The difficulty level was perfect. It balanced difficulty and challenge beautifully. Maybe that’s where the budget went. I competed this game three times with VP and Plough Boy, and, although the lack of online jarred, split screen japes continued to thrill and provide seminal gaming moments. The sense of comradeship, and shared experiences of joy, panic, awe, frustration and, finally, achievement, were second to none.
And there were some great levels. The red ant canyon, whereby you tried to farm the Lysander Z. One of the later missions which featured a wrecked cityscape was particularly tough. Dropships across the sky constantly dropped spiders and stuff. You got swamped VERY easily. VP and I spent ages trying to tweak loadouts and strategy. Eventually, we pinned it down. A certain ufo had to be taken down first. One of us had to have double zexr turrets. The other a Lysander Z and a zexr turret. You had to cycle them perfectly or you’d be swarmed. You had to retreat skilfully and stick together.
It was hard. But it was rewarding.
That’s my other memory of EDF3. It was tight and tough, but I finished the bitch 3 times. 1000G. So, despite my disappointment with the scope of its content, I still cherish a real sense of achievement with this game.
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