The Game: Using the left joystick, you control the movement of your ship within the confines of a screen filled with mines, alien aggressors, and occasional purple “confinement crystals” which you have to catch, because these contain human prisoners of war. The right joystick engages your hyperdrive, enabling you to go zipping along in true Defender style. (North American Philips, 1982)
Memories: Another infamous “not quite a copy of a popular arcade game” from the Odyssey2 gang, Freedom Fighters was supposed to be similar to Defender, but somehow it misses the mark.
I’ve softened a bit in my opinion of this game over the years – I used to write it off as a train wreck – but I’m still ambivalent about the two-joystick control scheme, especially since the Odyssey2 provides absolutely no way to hold those two joysticks together for easy use. Not all of us were able to find a co-pilot on short notice.
So while I’ll admit that Freedom Fighters isn’t the utter disaster I thought it was a few years back in the original incarnation of this review, there’s just something about it that feels like a lack of forethought in the game design. But the problem there is that I can’t figure out how else hyperspace could’ve been triggered on and off without bringing the keyboard into it…which might or might not have been more of a mess.
