10 Video Games Better Than The Sum Of Their Parts

5. Earth Defense Force 2017

Earth Defense Force 2017 may not have been as prescient as the previous entry - its eponymous year passing with nary a hint of alien invasion - but what it lacks in foresight it makes up for in sheer batsh*t exuberance.

EDF 2017 is a riotously entertaining bug hunt that still feels fresh today. The Earth Defense Force franchise was almost entirely unknown in the West upon EDF 2017's release, but the third entry in the series soon converted a generation of gamers to the series' goofy charms.

Well, it did once they managed to see past the game's ramshackle presentation. Even for a game released in 2006, EDF 2017 looks dated, with cities that look like they were made out of paper mache and hordes of poorly animated insects jittering around like monsters in a Ray Harryhausen film. Not to mention the seemingly limited gameplay - you run, you gun, and that's your lot for the 53 mission campaign.

But EDF 2017 succeeds by making a virtue of its limitations. Those paper mache cities are just as fragile as the building material they resemble, crumbling under fire to create wonderfully tactile battlegrounds that sell the scale of the battles you engage in. The hordes of enemies may look crude, but that just means the developers can cram dozens of the buggers on-screen to rush you at any given moment. 

And although the campaign may be little more than blam-blam-kill-kill, EDF 2017 does a great job of doling out different armaments and enemy types across the breadth of its campaign, creating an ever-increasing crescendo of ludicrous cartoon violence that keeps you grinning ear to ear.

EDF!  EDF! EDF!