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This IS Your Daddy’s Shooter
By bukkhead | August 13, 2007
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: ‘GALAGA.’
Developed by Namco Bandai Games Inc.
Published byMidway.
Platforms: Xbox 360, (Xbox Live Arcade)
Genre: Table-Top Platform
There’s not much I’m going to be able to tell you about Galaga that you don’t already know, unless you’ve never heard of the game at all. And if you’ve never heard of the game, I really don’t see how you’re going to be the sort of person who reads this Blog, much less entries on video games . I just don’t see how any gamer over the age of 20 wouldn’t know about Galaga. The ones under 20 probably don’t care.
But I’ll try anyway, and either ingratiate myself to the sub 20s, or alienate myself further. Galaga has made it’s way to the Xbox 360 Live Arcade, continuing the line of Namco/Midway classics they’ve been doling out, from Joust to the Pac family. This rendition of Galaga doesn’t offer much in the way of enhanced graphics or gameplay features, other than the ability to change the number of lives you begin with, and the rate at which you get new lives. Also, as in other Arcade classics, you can choose to start on an advanced level, once you’ve achieved that level. Finally, in addition to a normal fire button, there’s an auto-fire button which fires again whenever your last shot hits or goes off the screen.
The achievements were incredibly easy to get: I got all 200 in about an hour of play, thanks mostly to that feature that lets you start on an advance level. The hardest achievement is getting a 100% clear rate on any “challenge” stage, which is not actually too difficult, provided you have the double ship, know the patterns of the aliens, and use the auto-fire button. After just a few games, the patterns are easily memorized.
For the price of 5 bucks, this may be worth it, just for the achievement points. Otherwise, this version of Galaga is going to have to sell itself on the oldest replay feature of any video game: the high score table. As of this writing, the all-time high score on the leaderboards is over 4 million (my own high score, 92 thousand, ranks around 31 thousandth place). I can only guess what level was reached with so many points.
The original stand-up arcade game was limited to only 255 levels; one assumes that this version either wraps at 255 back to zero, or just keeps going. And I’m sure the hard-core players rack up multiple extra lives as they move towards millions of points (I can’t imagine the tension of playing through 70 thousands points with no extra life, only to lose the life once you’ve gotten it, repeatedly).
But that’s just speculation, which is all that’s left at this point, since I’m 200/200 and not in the least bit interested in a super high score. Achievement points are becoming the fatal flaw of Xbox 360 games- the thing that makes me pick up a game I wouldn’t have maybe tried, and the thing that makes me put the game down before I’ve reached my own potential.
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