The objective of Galaga is to score as many points as possible by destroying insect-like enemies. The player controls a starfighter that can move left and right along the bottom of the playfield. Enemies swarm in groups in a formation near the top of the screen, and then begin flying down toward the player, firing bombs at the fighter. The game ends when the player's last fighter is lost, either by colliding with an enemy or one of its bullets, or by being captured. Galaga introduces a number of new features over its predecessor, Galaxian. Among these is the ability to fire more than one bullet at a time, a count of the player's "hit/miss ratio" at the end of the game, and a bonus "Challenging Stage" that occurs every few levels, in which a series of enemies fly onto and out of the screen in set patterns without firing at the player's ship or trying to crash into it. These stages award a large point bonus if the player manages to destroy every enemy. Another gameplay feature new to Galaga is the ability for enemies to capture the player's fighter. While the player is in control of just one fighter, a "boss Galaga" (which takes two shots to kill) periodically attempts to capture the fighter using a tractor beam. If successful, the fighter joins the enemy formation. If the player has more lives remaining, play resumes with a new fighter. The captured fighter flies down with the enemy that captured it, firing upon the player just like normal enemies, and can be shot and destroyed. The player can free the fighter by destroying the boss Galaga while in flight, causing the captured fighter to link up with the player's current fighter, doubling his or her firepower but also making a target twice as large. Galaga has an exploitable bug that can cause the attackers to stop firing bullets at the player, due to a coding error. In addition, similar to the famous "Split-Screen bug" in Pac-Man, a bug exists in Galaga in which the game "rolls over" from Level 255 to Level 0. Depending on the difficulty setting of the machine, this can cause the game to stall, requiring that the machine be reset or power-cycled in order to start a new game.
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the pre-scrolling shooting game with possibly the greatest emphasis on movement, not just with the single axis given to the player, but from the waves of enemies as well. shots move at just the right speed, with the player's shot limit increased to 2 per ship, but with a set minimum interval between. the large insectoid creatures [3] (an aside: what is it with shooting games and violence toward insects?? see also Centepede, Millipede, Gaplus [aka Galaga 3], Mushihimesama) make their dive toward and away from you with utmost grace, from the very start of each stage and the graceful movement doesn't let up for a single moment, even when they are at the idle formation. each galagan moves in distinct ways, not unlike the ghosts of the Jean-Less "Patman", with those blue and yellow bee-like things being the most devious: faking the player out by circling back toward them just before going off screen, or splitting into a chain of 3 things that also look like they could sting. the challenging stages are to this day the best intermission sections ever put into an arcade game: just enough of a break to catch a sip of water, coffee or tea, but engaging enough to encourage and help foster player mastery.
most galaga cabs out and about these days are either retofitted with an LCD (understandable these days as cathode ray tubes are long out of production and dwindling as they fail with age. but, more often than not, arcade LCDs taking in an analog signal from the edge connector [galaga is pre-JAMMA] without any sort of external upscaling have egregious input latency.), or i end up seeing it in a modern nostalgia-bait barcade-fodder combo Ms. Pacman/Galaga cab, which is fine, but still feels not right. i'd typically be respectfully ambivalent seeing this out in the wild, remembering how i grew tired of it after playing it for weeks via namco museum 64 when i was very young. but after coming across it in a sit-down table cab for the first time, i played it on a whim, and somehow made it to stage 16 on my first credit of galaga in nearly a decade. that experience pretty much helped me understand why namco earned such reverence for their works during the arcade's golden age. [4] [5] it's incredibly refined, and the ramp in speed immediately after the 2nd challenging stage is just on point. as it is a work from its era, for the arcades, it has simple, but immediate to understand mechanics which would be quite futile to explain in detail: you just shoot the Galagans and attempt to get the best score you can, and go for the dual-ship configuration if you wish. as it is a work from its era, it is, especially in the wake of the strive for photorealism and "Could [new game with shiny browns] Be The Citizen Kane Of Gaming????" [6], commonly dismissed and reduced to just another footnote in the medium's history. [7]
[1] that is not Tempest, but its design is bit of an edge case of what was commonly done during the invader-era of STG. that will be saved for another time.
[2] the reason i KNOW for a damn fact that galaga is a "Boomer Shooter" is because like 13 years ago my dad saw me playing world renowned mobile gacha game developer Computer Art Visual Entertainment Company, Limited's DoDonPachi (1997) and said "ohh hey.... that's like galaga!!!!"
[3] without an established scale for the size of the player ship, we can only come to such conclusions by way of assumption. the sprites of the craft the player controls and the insectoids (i am not sure if the developers at namco gave them all indivudal names as they would in xevious, the last "Boomer Shooter" ever made.) occupy roughly the same space onscreen, and assuming that the player craft is single-occupancy for just the pilot, it would make sense that the insectoid creatures serving as opposition in this computer-controlled video game are about the size of a small airplane, if we were to compare it to something which exists on earth. i certainly have not seen an insect or crustacean the size of one of those, personally.
[4] i, frankly think it's criminal to be a video game enjoyer to be outright dismissive of anything older than Super Mario Sixty Four. based on how often i see "game is bad because it's Atari" or something along those lines, it is evident that there is a gross misconception loading to a broader mischarachterization of arcade design as ill-placed boomer nostalgia, deriding such works as "mindless", especially when it comes to works from the period between taito's space invaders and the north american release of nintendo's 8-bit home console, when video arcade games made the move from discrete logic to microprocessors. this is something i too have been guilty of in the past, as the era i grew up in was dominated by the likes of halo and counter-strike.
[5] my opinion is that the real "golden age" of the arcade, on the basis of average game quality and design advancements, was post-street fighter II until development for sega naomi games ceased. but that's not what historians wish to push, it doesn't make sense for infancy of any medium to be considered a "golden age". maybe something is referred to as a "golden age" based on Profits Earned or something like that.
[6] i would much rather see more works within this medium that channel the same energy as The Toxic Avenger (1984)
[7] like this
personal fact: i am pretty sure this is what i played on september eleventh, 2001 after coming home from school. shouts out to namco museum 64 even tho you sucked compared to the playstation volumes.
The Sequel to Galaxian, Galaga improves over the first one in many ways. This is a top-down game where you once again play as a spaceship killing alien ships. This game could handle a slightly better movement system, better firing and allowed you to shoot multiple shots on screen at once all of which was limited on the first one due to the older software. The game ever so slightly looked better when it came to ship design and style. One of the biggest improvements is the way even my spaceships move on screen and their capabilities where all of a sudden, a spaceship could steal one of your lives and use it against you, very cool stuff I did not expect while playing and because of these small changes I always preferred this one over the previous. This, much like a lot of the classic Arcade titles, will probably live on forever in some form or another.
9.5/10