Galaga

Galaga is a fixed shooter arcade game developed and published by Namco in Japan and published by Midway in North America in 1981. It is the sequel to Galaxian, released in 1979. The gameplay of Galaga puts the player in control of a space ship which is situated on the bottom of the screen. At the beginning of each stage, the area is empty, but over time, enemy aliens fly in formation, and once all of the enemies arrive on screen, they will come down at the player’s ship in formations of one or more and may either shoot it or collide with it. During the entire stage, the player may fire upon the enemies, and once all enemies are vanquished, the player moves onto the next stage.

Galaga introduces a number of new features over its predecessor, Galaxian. Among these are an explosion sound that occurs when the player loses a life, 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 at level three, and from then onwards every four 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.The objective of Galaga is to score as many points as possible by destroying insect-like enemies. The player controls a fighter spaceship that can move left and right along the bottom of the playfield. Enemies fly in groups into a formation near the top of the screen, then begin flying down toward the player, firing bombs at and attempting to collide with the fighter. Occasionally, a “boss Galaga” attempts to capture the player’s fighter using a tractor beam – if successful, the fighter joins the formation and must be freed by the player (using another ship and costing him a life), enabling him to control two ships simultaneously. If the boss is destroyed while still in formation with a captured fighter, the fighter will disappear after leaving formation and then will appear again on the next level attached to another boss Galaga. If the fighter is shot by the player, it is destroyed and does not return. The game is over when the player’s last ship is destroyed or captured.