Instead, you're left with a very basic shooter that's immensely challenging, but repetitive by design. Namco-Bandai hasn't even attempted to meddle with the difficulty settings in order to eke the most out of its appeal. You can, of course, fiddle with a few basic settings, such as how many lives you start with, or the intervals at which you gain extra lives, but if you play on anything other than the default you'll forfeit the right to upload your score to the Leaderboard.
Even the lure of 200 Gamerscore points soon wears off once you realise how insultingly easy most of them are to attain - after that you're just playing for pride, but the game quickly gets so frantic it's more luck than judgement that sees you through the later levels (feel free to argue that point - I know you won't let us down!). Easy pickings Oh look, I *saw* a ship, that's obviously worth giving me an achievement for.įor as wonderful an example of 1981 gaming as Galaga is, and as addictive as it remains, the thrill is gone after about half an hour of blasting. It's the 1981 vintage lovelessly shovelled out at a price that still feels steep considering its long-term appeal. Other Live Arcade releases have thrown in alternate versions to ensure that the retro faithful are kept happy, along with newcomers, but not so here. To all intents and purposes, this is just a basic, no frills port of the arcade original, with no graphical enhancements, no new Live-specific modes or sympathetic re-imaginings to try and drag the concept up to date (as Namco repeatedly attempted in the 80s).
For starters, there's literally nothing new added to the game apart from the ability to start from the last stage you reached. If you're one of the few hardy (or young) souls who still doesn't have access to a copy of Galaga, then there's perhaps more justification for shelling out for one of the oldest games still on sale - but we'd vehemently argue that there are better things to spend your money on.įor the rest of us, there's not a whole lot of point to Galaga's arrival on Live Arcade for several reasons. By now, the continual retro compilation re-releases on every platform known to man over the past 12 years must account for practically every Galaga fan out there, with MAME mopping up those who refuse to pay for their childhood memories.
#GALAGA FREE ONLINE FULL VERSION#
But such is the perfectly honed difficulty curve that even now Galaga is underpinned by a delicious one-more-go appeal, boosted immensely by the obsessive lure of global high score tables and the friends list that comes as standard with these Live Arcade offerings.īut whether it's worth the 400 points to own the full version is down to how much the latter two features matter to you. Like all arcade games of the era, the actual level design was purely to kill you off as quickly as possible so that you'd shovel more loose change into the hungry cabinet. Play it again And the prize to the most pointless use of widescreen and HD resolutions goes to. Add the primal videogaming sound effects and addictive little ditties and you'll dive straight into a gaming time warp that never fails to charm the hairy ears of a retro gamer. No power-ups (not counting the recapture of your fighter), no weapons upgrades, no continues, just level after level of screen-clearing chaos punctuated by score-boosting Challenge stages. Sure, it's as basic as it gets, tasking you with clearing wave after wave of dive bombing, missile-spewing insectoid enemies and going for the high score. shoot things that fly into you until you die - it's Space Invaders with one other idea." Technically, nothing Tom said was incorrect, but since when did simple ideas constitute a bad game? It's time to put my best 'incredulous old fart' hat on and at least try and defend what it stands for, 25 years on from its release.įirst of all, out of all the dozens (hundreds?) of Space Invaders clones that spewed forth from the arcades in the late '70s and early '80s, Galaga was easily one the most memorable, and is probably the only one I can stand playing for concentrated periods of time even now. After a while you just assume everyone must have come across certain cultural icons, but today's confession just goes to show how wrong you can be.Īnd another thing guaranteed to have the retro community marching on Eurogamer towers with flaming pitchforks was when he admitted "There's nothing to it. Astonishing fact of the day: Tom had never played Galaga until it popped up on Live Arcade this morning, which is the gaming equivalent of never having seen, I dunno, Blade Runner.
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