Those pesky Defender aliens are back, and are out to kidnap and mutate all of the humanoids on your home planet. So what are you gonna do about it?

Die. Early and often.

Defender 3 is the unreleased sequel to Defender and Stargate, and the difficulty level has gone up exponentially. The basic gameplay is the same: try and keep alien Landers from abducting the inhabitants of a planet before they're all turned into deadly mutants. But now there are more aliens than ever before. Way more. Way, way more.

Fortunately, your ship has been beefed-up too. In addition to your laser, smart bombs, Inviso and hyperspace, you now have heat-seeking missiles, a flame thrower and time-warp. You also have a "self-destruct" button, which hardly seems necessary.

The flame thrower is pretty self explanatory, and the most fun to use. Unfortunately, it doesn't kill the aliens so much as it ticks them off. Really bad. Few things are angrier than a flaming alien. The heat-seeking missiles work pretty well, except you don't want to fire one off while using the flame thrower. Time-warp works similarly to the warp button in Astro Blaster - slowing things down for a few seconds - unfortunately, in Defender 3, it only slows you down.

Because of the added buttons, the dexterity required to play Defender 3 is ridiculous, and when you throw in the insane difficulty level, you have a game that's over before your quarter hits the bottom of the coin slot.

What they should have added to this game... is pizza. I could really go for a large one with extra cheese right about now. Playing this sadistic game has really worked up my appetite. I think everyone would agree that there are few things that smell as good as fresh pizza. So why not add it to a video game? Sure, you'd still be throwing your money away even trying to play this game, but at least it would smell great! And that would have been a big plus in a lot of arcades.

Mmmmm... pizza.