"Aliens won't give you bonus rounds, trust me. Don't ask me how I know this."

Galaga is Namco's sequel to their arcade game Galaxian. Later, they made a third game in the series, which wasn't as successful. Galaga's seen direct releases on eight different platforms.

Genre-Action
Release Date-1981
Publisher-Bally Midway

Game Play-
7.6/10

Ever seen a game that looks easy to play, but it isn't? Well, Galaga is one of those games.

Galaga is basically a better version of Space Invaders. In Space Invaders, you basically shoot the enemies as the slowly flew up to yours and avoid their shots. In Galaga, enemies swiftly try to attack you and take shots at you, and your ship can be captured by certain enemies. Having a ship captured isn't a bad thing. If you can shoot down the enemy that captured it without hitting the captured ship, then you can get it back and, get this, have two ships shooting at once! If you hit your own ship, then you lose a life.

The main purpose of this game is to shoot down all the ships before they attack you by flying at you. The enemies develop more moves as you progress through the game, such as creating smaller ships and shooting at you as they line up in place. The enemies tend to have certain patters, like having two of them go after your ship when it’s in a corner. There are also boss ships in every round. They take two hits to be destroyed, and they have the ability to capture your ship.

Every few rounds, you get a bonus round, which is where you see how many ships you can shoot down at once, and you get extra points for shooting down a set of them. It's one of the highlights of the game.

The game has made a few good changes from Galaxian. For instance, the enemies line up in sets instead of just appearing on the screen at the beginning of each round, and the game moves at a much faster pace than Galaxian; these reasons are why I like this more than Galaxian.

This game is deceivingly hard, and will require some practice to get good at, despite the only moves you have is shoot and move left and right.

Control-
6.7/10

The controller consists of an arcade stick and a shooting button, and yet it's more difficult to use. You can develop a bad hand cramp from rapid pushing of the shooting button. It's kinda like the hand cramp you get after writing too much with a pencil.

The buttons are overall pretty responsive. The only problem about the in-game control is that sometimes you want the ship to move faster than it can. It’s not a big problem, but it can be frustrating at times.

Graphics-
8.6/10

The graphics basically consist of differently colored alien ships on an outer space background. What bugs me is that you have the exact same graphics in every normal round.1

Overall, the graphics are above-average for the time when it was made. Although I thought Ms. Pac-Man looked better (It was made the same year), this still looks pretty nice. And the enemy ships look like big alien bugs. And they have the same design, only they’re differently colored.

Audio-
7.1/10

The sound effects can be slightly annoying at times, and there are only a few music tracks in the game. No music plays while you're playing, which I would expect from a game made back then.

The few music tracks in the game matched the setting well, but the sound effects are what brought the section down. As with most arcade games, the sound effects tend to aggravate me. It’s because they’re so repetitive, droll and simple. I would’ve really appreciated more sound effects than the “bleep” sound effects.

Enjoyability-
8.1/10

It's simple, yet somehow classically addictive. But after, like 100 plays, the game starts to be boring. The challenge of destroying the ships, plus the simplicity and the deceptive difficulty of the game will entertain you for hours.

Score Rundown

Game Play-7.6/10 – Where’s Alf?
Control-6.7/10 – This game gave me Carpet Turtle Syndrome
Graphics-8.6/10 – I like outer space
Audio-7.1/10 – They may have well used chirping birds as sound effects
Enjoyability-8.1/10 – It’s not that hard to do. Wait….IT IS!

Score-38.1/50

Percentage of Gaming Goodness-76%

Overall-8/10

Doodleheimer's Recommendationitivity-

You must play this game. If you pass this machine and don't play it, then Mr. Doodleheimer'll pay you a visit.

Play price-$0.25 for regular machine play, $0.50 on Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga dual machines.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/01, Updated 05/20/02