The games just wouldn’t be same without hordes of massive arthropoda clogging up the horizon, crawling over each other and climbing up the sides of skyscrapers. It’s this judgement that sums up what is so wonderful about the Earth Defence Force series. That if you’re going to design a budget shooter, concentrate on what really matters: hordes of huge enemies, screen-splitting explosions, speaker-bursting sound effects, a ridiculous alien invasion storyline, hilarious voice acting, colossal free-roaming levels and fantastic weapons (and plenty of them). Forget all the rubbish stuff that only geeks with no sense of fun care about like frame rate, slowdown, 3D models, auto-saves, balanced difficulty, online modes, decent achievements and a boring tutorial. Get that disc in, get playing and get blasting.

This game has been labelled as dumb fun, but it’s not that: it’s purely primal. It feeds off our basic gaming urges. If you want referential, it’s that ‘30 seconds of fun’ (TM) that Bungie love to talk about. It works simply for the fact that it never gets old. You never tire of sending a hail of rockets into a throng of alien invaders and watching them scream through the air as the massive blast hits home. That and laying a whole building block to waste because the killer spider you were aiming for jumped over your massive rocket.

It’s also a game that respects the player. Control-wise, everything is kept pure (dual analogues to move - jump, change weapon and shoot on the triggers). There’s no penalty for levelling entire cities (in moments reminiscent of the opening sequence from Team America). There are no restarts if you accidentally nuke your entire squad of teammates, there are no awful ‘protect’ missions to complete and you don’t even have to worry about ammo conservation. Each of the 53 levels just has one aim: kill everything.

It’s utterly repetitive, but like a ten-minute long Aphex Twin remix running at 180 BPM, that’s entirely the point. It nails a large part of the reason why many of us play games and just dishes up the same delicious serving again and again. The only artificial ingredient in an otherwise beautiful recipe being the awful vehicles, but true to form these can just simply be left alone, their inclusion probably nothing more than a joke in the first place.

The five difficulty levels range from very easy to complete nightmare. The game’s clever design allows better weapons to be dropped by enemies at higher difficulty levels, encouraging the player to play through all the difficulty levels in order. In addition, armour enhancements are dropped that gradually increase the player’s total health throughout the game, making those hardest levels possible (but still a complete bitch).

Fans of the series might comment that the game lacks some of the enemies and features from the second PS2 game particularly. Or they would, until they realised that to be so churlish would be to miss the entire point of the series and then they would pick up their joypad again and get stuck into the excellent co-op action.

No game has gumption like EDF. No other game has the balls to make the most basic enemy an ant the size of a bus. No other game lets the player get away with such wanton collateral damage. No other game has the audacity to throw so much at you and fill the screen with such massive explosions that your neighbours will think aliens really have invaded and will hide in their cellars. The sheer spectacle is a sensory supernova. In some ways there are many games like this one, but in so many ways there are no games like Earth Defence Force. We should celebrate it and shout its name from the highest rooftops. EDF! EDF!