Though many have attempted to remake or copy, there is only one Galaga.
You play as a lone ship in space against an alien race of space bugs….or is it an alien race with bug-like ships? Anyhow, it’s up to you to plow through wave after wave of alien bug ships through the game’s 255 levels to ultimately uh…make the game lock up.
You start each stage with your ship at the bottom of the screen while the alien waves fly into the top of the screen from the left, right, and middle. Any remaining bugs will line up and dive at your ship. The bugs you’ll face consist of bees, moths, and the infamous Galagas, which, in addition to attacking, they also have beams that will suck up and take control of your ship, that is, if you manage to leave more than one Galaga on the screen. Once your ship is under control, it will dive down with the Galaga that captured it. If you manage to take out the Galaga on that dive, you’ll be rewarded with two ships to control giving you a double shot. After level eight, one bee per level will morph into 3 similar bugs (including the classic Galaxians in some stages) which you can destroy for bonus points. Once you destroy all the bugs on a given level, you’re off to the next stage. Every three or four stages lies a challenge stage which will have waves of bugs flying through the level in patterns. You’re rewarded for performance with a tally at the end of the stage giving you a bonus. You’ll receive 100 points for every bug destroyed. If you manage to destroy all forty bugs, you’ll get the 10,000 point super happy grand prize. As you fight through levels, more bugs will gradually fly in, causing the relatively safe corners at the beginning of the game deadly by level twenty. The bugs do exhibit some great AI for the time this game was put out as they will attempt to trap you in the corner while the next wave of diving bugs go in for the kill.
You control your ship with a two-way joystick and fire with the fire button (of course). The limit of horizontal space you have to work with is part of the game’s challenge as the game will serve some really intense moments in later levels and you’ll find yourself with little space to work with while dodging oncoming bugs, especially the bees which will come back around for another dive when reaching the bottom of the screen. The speed of the game is impressive when compared to the games that inspired it, such as Space Invaders and Galaxian where you can only fire one shot and have to wait for it to leave the screen before shooting again.
In addition to the superior gameplay, the visuals were as great as they could get back in 1981. The visuals are colorful and as full of life as the technology allowed. Everything looks great such as the twinkling star field background to the assortment of bugs you encounter as well as your ship. Though you’ll be fighting the same bugs throughout the game, you will encounter other outlandish bugs and satellites, among other things in later challenge stages.
Galaga also excels in the sound department with some of the most memorable sounds heard in a game. Guaranteed that now, over twenty years later, everyone remembers the song that played at the beginning of stage one and the sounds of the diving bugs about as much as they can remember the sound of Pac-Man eating power pellets and ghosts. Though the game lacks any real soundtrack, you will get the aforementioned start music as well as the familiar challenge stage music. For a bunch of bleeps and bloops, Galaga does a better job of making you remember it than any commercial jingle…well, except for the Crispy Critters jingle that’s been stuck in my head since 1997. They’re indubitably delicious you know.
Galaga epitomizes classic gaming in every way and is still loved as it has survived the death of arcades, the crash and rebirth of console gaming, as well as the 16 and 32-bit revolutions and beyond. To this day it has seen numerous bootlegs (the second most bootlegged game next to Pac Man), a number of remakes, ports to the NES, Atari 2600, and Game Boy among many other consoles, as well emulated on countless Namco collections on multiple platforms. If you go to an arcade auction today, you'll see that a Galaga machine will fetch more than a Dragon's Lair, which goes to show that it's endured. It was re-released with Ms. Pac Man in the “Class of ‘81” arcade cabinet to a new generation of fans, though the gameplay was tainted somewhat as you were able to continue if you lost all of your lives. Bummer. It’s still tons of fun to play, especially on a cabinet with the fast firing chip installed, though it doesn’t affect the difficulty of the game that much at all. Though many have attempted to remake or copy, there is only one Galaga.