The Stack

I’ve been talking a lot about this game’s features and mechanics, but I haven’t said much yet about the experience of playing it. It’s quite enjoyable! Easily my favorite of the three classic arcade game remakes I’ve played this month. As I once said about another game, the pleasure of a game such as this has a lot to do with the pleasure of just moving around in the environment, of the game’s responsiveness in putting your intentions into action, and it does that part well. Even with a modern dual-joystick controller, designing a good, intuitive system for moving around freely in 3D space is not trivial. Space flight here is fairly streamlined, with very little cognitive friction, letting you devote more of your attention to higher-level goals.

One touch that I really like: Forward movement is the default. You can stop dead if you want, just hold your position and swivel. This is useful in some situations, such as mining space rocks: you want to aim right at the rock for long enough to blast it apart, but you don’t want to ram into it. But such situations are the exception, not the norm, and are treated as such by the controls. Holding down the left trigger button stops you, like it’s a brake pedal, just as holding down the right trigger makes you go faster. (Holding down both makes them cancel out. That’s not part of the game design; it’s an inescapable result of how Xbox-compatible controllers treat the trigger buttons as a single analog axis.) Holding still requires continuously applied intent. That feels good here. It feels right. I kind of wonder how such a scheme would feel in a less appropriate context. Imagine if you had to hold a button down to keep Mario from running forward all the time.

One thing I just discovered while looking at the the control configuration: By default, the D-pad lets you strafe! (That is, move perpendicular to the direction you’re facing.) I had poked at the D-pad a little while trying to figure out how to activate Special Items, but I must not have held it long enough to see any effect. I don’t think I’ll be using that. Strafing just feels weird in this context. It really shouldn’t feel weird, if this is supposed to be space, but it does. My expectation is that my spaceship, despite looking like a veiny butterfly, is basically an airplane. Airplanes don’t strafe.

And anyway, I need to free up the D-pad so I can remap Special Items to it. It turns out that the default controller configuration just kind of falls down there. There isn’t a notion of selecting a Special Item the way you can select a Secondary Weapon; every Special Item needs its own button, and there are only so many buttons available. Playing from mouse and keyboard has no such problem, of course. Were the developers assuming that players would be playing from mouse and keyboard? Well, the game was only released on Windows, so they knew that players would have keyboards available. Looking that up, I also learned that the developers were former employees of LookingGlass Studios, the makers of games such as System Shock and Ultima Underworld¹It’s a shame there aren’t and combination locks in the game., which were absolutely designed around using the keyboard for more complex 3D positioning than we’re used to these days. It just seems kind of backwards when the rest of the game plays from a controller so well.

I’ve passed level 12 — the halfway point! Enemies here are bigger and more trilobite-like. I suspect that by the end, ordinary warrior ships will rival the level 1 Sinistar in size.

Even though I’ve been playing for a while and seen half the game, there are still mechanics that I haven’t really mastered — specifically, the Special Items. These are among powerups contained inside special courier ships or blue-veined asteroids (how did they get in there?), and they mostly seem to be very powerful, but temporary — just the sort of thing you need in a clutch. Shields that block all damage. An instant return to full health. Automated drop-and-forget defense turrets. That sort of thing. I’ve deployed these from time to time, but I haven’t figured out how to choose specific Special Items from your inventory when playing from a controller. (The manual documents how to select them from the keyboard, but controller is clearly the best way to play this game.) I’ll probably have to figure that out soon to continue making progress. I’ll probably have to look at the input settings.

The Secondary Weapons, on the other hand, I’ve pretty much figured out, and they’ve been essential to getting this far. These are obtained from the same sources as the Special Items, and both selected and used via the controller’s face buttons. There are enemy-seeking missiles, a lightning gun that arcs in chains from ship to ship, a concussion weapon that sends out a spherical shockwave that damages everything in its radius — it’s not clear what medium is propagating this shockwave in the vacuum of space, but presumably it’s the same thing that allows me to hear explosions. Anyway, there’s a good variety of distinct effects that have advantages in specific situations, but in practice, they all come down to this: they let you kill stuff more quickly. This is important. There are things you need to get gone as quickly as possible.

But at the same time, you really want to use the secondary weapons sparingly, because they all consume resources. Each is found with a limited number of charges, but more importantly, they consume crystals — the same crystals that you use in Sinibombs. Indeed, Sinibombs are really a kind of secondary weapon, selected and deployed using the same controls as all the others, but they’re a special one, in that they’re available from the start and you never run out of charges for it. Crystals are also consumed when you heal damage, so that if you run out of crystals, you stop healing. Ideally, you want to minimize the number of crystals you spend on anything other than Sinibombs, because the more crystals you spend, the more crystals you have to mine to replace them, and time spend mining is time not spent on larger concerns, like bombing the warp gate or destroying the worker drones.

There’s a sort of Maslow-like hierarchy of needs at work here. In place of self-actualization, there’s destroying the Sinistar. Before you can concern yourself with that, you need crystals. But the first need, at the bottom of the pyramid, is the same as it always is: safety. When a particularly tough enemy spawns, taking it down becomes your first priority, crystals be damned. Secondary weapons exist for that moment.

After several more attempts at Sinistar Unleashed failed to get me past level 3 (and most of them didn’t even get that far), I finally decided to dial the difficulty down to Easy. This is always a difficult decision, hurtful as it is to one’s pride, and potentially ruinous to the experience of the game, letting the player coast through it without coming to important realizations about effective tactics. I’ve seen more games where Hard difficulty is clearly the right way to play it than ones where Easy is. But now that I’ve experienced Easy in SU, I think it was the right choice. Even if Easy isn’t the right way to play this game, it’s the right way to start out.

The most obvious thing that the difficulty level affects is the number of lives you start with: 5 in Normal, 3 in Hard, and a whopping 10 in Easy. Other than that, Easy mode just makes it really obvious that the game is helping you along. There’s a noticeable auto-aim effect, such that the tracer fire from your main guns abruptly jumps to a visibly different angle when your aim gets close to an enemy. In Normal, collecting the crystals that you blast out of the space rocks is a delicate and time-consuming business; in Easy, they’re magnetically attracted to your ship, and will sometimes follow you halfway across the map if your hold is already full. The thing is, these are both fairly standard features for 3D games. Indeed, without a little aim assist, first-person shooters would be basically impossible. But most games apply it subtly enough to fool the player into thinking it isn’t there, and SU in Easy mode is anything but subtle about it. I suspect that both effects are also present in Normal, just to a much lesser degree.

But even Easy isn’t trivial. I still die sometimes. I’ve gotten as far as level 9, but not in a single game. Mostly death seems to come suddenly — there’s a female computer voice that says “Danger: Low Heath” when you’re low on health, and usually I’m dead by the time I hear it. This may be the same sort of thing that I saw people on the emulation forums complaining about in the original game; the haters were adamant that the game wasn’t difficult, it was bullshit. But I suspect that most of my deaths could be avoided, once I get better at directing my attention. The game throws a lot of information at you, with HUDs in three corners of the screen, any of which could be showing something vitally important. And once I’ve mastered using them in Easy mode, maybe I’ll be ready for Normal.

Having reached level 9, I can start games there (in Easy mode only), with 10 lives but no powerups. The jury is out on whether this is an advantageous tradeoff or not. As promised, every 4th level is a Bonus Level, with no Sinistar and some other goal to pursue. The first one asks you defend four colonies from attackers, the second one to destroy a space station’s shield generators. I have completed neither task successfully, and was rather surprised when the game let me start at the next level anyway.

Frustrated by my lack of progress in Galaga: Destination Earth, I try another, similar game from the Stack: Sinistar Unleashed, a 3D reimagining of an arcade game famous for being frustratingly difficult. This might seem like a strange choice under the circumstances, but (A) Sinistar Unleashed is significantly different from the original Sinistar and (B) I never really understood why Sinistar had that reputation in the first place. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s not that I found Sinistar easy, mind you. It’s just that I didn’t find it significantly harder than most other arcade games. For a quarter, I could get a solid few minutes of gameplay, in which I would finish the first level and sometimes the second. Looking around at retrogaming forums while trying to shore up my knowledge of the mechanics, it seems like the people who complain about it simply have a different perspective than me. They expect that, with enough practice, they should be able to completely master a game, to the point where they can play it indefinitely. And Sinistar simply never let them do that.

But, as I say, Sinistar Unleashed is a different game. Completely mastering this game doesn’t mean playing indefinitely. It means beating level 24. And it doesn’t even expect you to do it in a single go, like G:DE does: it’s possible to make permanent progress. According to the manual, “If you’ve successfully completed the bonus level of a zone in a previous game, you can skip that zone when starting a new game”. What’s a “zone”? Apparently it’s four levels, matching the cycles of the original game. But I haven’t yet gotten beyond level 3, so I’m still in the position of starting each game from the very beginning.

Where the other remakes I’ve been playing hew pretty close to the visual style of the originals, SU heads off in its own direction, more Psygnosis-y in its sense of cool. Enemies are sort of biomechanical and crustacean-like, including the Sinistars themselves. In the original, the Sinistar was a big metal demon head, and kind of goofy in a way that doesn’t fit here — although something similar does show up on the Game Over screen, suggesting that it might be the final boss. Here, there seems to be a different Sinistar on every level, and every one that I’ve seen looks like some horrible mutated sea creature. Even the player’s ship, although less crablike, is kind of organic-looking, with a veiny texture that changes color as you take damage.

I suppose it can get away with altering the visual style because so much because the Sinistar identity has so much more to do with the gameplay. There really wasn’t anything else like it at the arcades. It was a space shooter, sure, but it was one that gave the player an unusual amount of freedom to prioritize. An enemy fleet is building the Sinistar, a big scary battlestation which is only vulnerable to bombs made from crystals that you can shoot-mine from space rocks. But the same crystals are exactly what the enemies need to build the Sinistar. So you’re competing with them for resources, and can slow them down by destroying the workers, but this distracts you from your own crystal-collection efforts — as do the warrior ships hunting you down. It’s the sort of thing you more often see in RTS games than shooters, and it survives mostly intact in SU.

The biggest changes at that level of abstraction are these: In SU, the Sinistar is a lot more dangerous, and you can’t carry enough crystals at a time to destroy it completely, but you can damage it in advance by throwing bombs at it while it’s still under construction. The in-fiction justification for this is that the thing the workers are building isn’t actually the Sinistar itself, but the dimensional gate that allows it to enter your sector of space. Damaging the gate delays its completion and forces the Sinistar to spend longer in hyperspace, which is inherently damaging to it. If you do enough damage, you can even destroy the gate before the Sinistar appears. I myself have managed this exactly once so far.

I’d like to go into a little more detail about what makes the Moon mission in Galaga: Destination Earth so hard, and to do this, I’m going to have to describe the overall structure of the game a little. The whole thing is divided into nine or ten missions, or Stages as the game calls them, each in a different spacey setting. (My uncertainty about the number of Stages is based on whether the tenth one counts or not; apparently it’s a sort of post-victory thing, an endless training mission in a simulation.) Each stage contains multiple Waves, which vary in both their prespective (or Attack Pattern) and their objectives. Just like in the original arcade game, some waves are your basic shoot-all-the-aliens-to-progress deal, and some are bonus waves, where the aliens run in circles for a little while and then depart, and you’re awarded bonus points based on how many you destroyed before they got away. Other waves are simply obstacle courses, where you run through hazards and don’t have a strong reason to shoot aliens other than preventing them from shooting you. And then there are the Mission Zones.

Mission Zones are the places where you have some specific goal other than destroying aliens. Usually this means destroying some kind of stationary targets, like the solar collectors that the Galaga are using to generate fuel for their ships or whatever, but your goal can also be something like repairing the human colonists’ water purifiers. Which, however, you still accomplish by shooting them. The game isn’t rich in verbs; pretty much the only things you can do to environmental objects is shoot them or ram into them, and I’ve seen only one mission zone, a “rescue the stranded astronauts” deal, where you ram into things.

There are usually two or three mission zones in a Stage, and they’re invariably in Attack Pattern Alpha, which is to say, 3D over-the-shoulder view, zooming through an obstacle-strewn 3D environment. What happens if you pass by a mission goal object without shooting it? You usually get another chance. Even though you seem to be flying forward in a single direction, the mission zone environments loop until you’ve cleared them. In fact the missions rely on this; some of the targets are placed such that it’s impossible to get them all on a single pass through the zone. But there’s always a time limit, so you only get so many tries before you fail. If you fail, you have to start the entire Stage over from the beginning.

Now, I said previously that the Moon has two very hard bits. One of them is in an ordinary shoot-all-the-aliens wave in Attack Pattern Alpha. The thing that makes it hard is that the aliens are unusually close to you. There’s this one sort of alien ship that has an impenetrable shield on the side that’s usually facing you, meaning that it’s only vulnerable at the moments when it turns to break formation, and the only way I know to reliably kill one of those is to wait until it waggles like a bee, signaling that it’s about to make a move, and then quickly park my starfighter so that it’s aiming right at it and just spam fire. And this doesn’t work in this wave, because when it waggles, it’s already too close to aim at without crashing into it, which doesn’t even hurt it because of its shield. So getting past this wave is basically luck and patience. Well, you can greatly improve your luck by getting an additional bullet from merit badges, making this section a lot easier if you don’t cheat your way to it.

The second hard bit is a mission zone. The goal is to destroy some rockets that are about to launch towards Earth — in fact, they start to launch just as they come into view. What this means is that, unlike all previous mission zones, you only get one try. You have to shoot all the rockets as soon as they appear or redo the entire Stage, including the previous hard bit. And several of the rockets come in pairs, one on the left side and one on the right, so that you have to destroy one and then quickly reorient yourself to aim at the other. And I am just not that good at aiming at things quickly in Attack Pattern Alpha. Getting good at that is probably the secret to beating the game.

Before I go any farther, I want to at least briefly address the most significant gaming experience I had during the recent hiatus, before the details completely slip my mind. Animal Well was the darling of the indie puzzle game scene when it came out, largely thanks to its multi-layered puzzle stucture, visual inventiveness, tons of secrets at all levels of accessibility, and general enigmatic vibes.

In form, it’s a 2D metroidvania — you platform around a large connected environment, collecting tools that let you access more of the place. What exactly is that place? It’s a mystery. It’s clearly a constructed environment, largely made of damp masonry and clanking machinery, but what is its purpose? And why is there an ostrich down there? I say “down there” because obviously the title suggests that you’re underground, but even that much isn’t clear. There’s a large vertical shaft in the middle of the map, stretching up from room to room, and for a long time, I operated under the speculation that if I could just get to the top of that shaft, I could emerge into the world outside. This turns out not to be the case: the map has both horizontal and vertical wraparound. It’s a self-contained space, brooking no escape by normal physical means. And it’s haunted. Some of the exotic animals you encounter are definitely ghosts. Possibly all of them are. Are you a ghost? It’s not at all clear what you are. A little round thing. A lot of people seem to call the player character a “blob”, but that doesn’t sit right with me. You clearly have feet. Blobs don’t have feet.

As a metroidvania, it does require a certain amount of platforming skill, and I wouldn’t recommend it to players who aren’t accustomed to that. But part of the brilliance of the game is the extent to which skills and tools can substitute for each other. For example, there’s a frisbee you can find that, with just a little effort, you can throw and then jump on it — something that you’ll probably discover by accident — and just glide over some of the more difficult platforming sections. There’s a bubble wand — yes, nearly all of the tools are toys — that makes bubbles that you can jump on to gain a little elevation. It only creates one bubble at a time, but eventually you find a wand without this restriction, and can use it to climb a chain of bubbles to any height. More skilled players than me manage to do the same with the original bubble wand, somehow jumping from one bubble and creating a new bubble to jump onto at the same time, accessing secrets that I only found much later.

These tools (or toys) all have the virtue of general applicability, that they behave the same way in all places and have emergent uses. And to be fair, not every tool in the game is like that. A UV lamp that reveals invisible messages is only useful for that specific purpose. But in general, the degree of general applicability here is at a level above most other games of the sort. I think of Prince of Persia (2008) as epitomizing the opposite approach: there, you get special mobility powers, but you can only activate them on special colored plates, removing the possibility that the player will use them to break sequence, but also removing any sense of experiment and discovery from their use.

But Animal Well isn’t so concerned with stopping you from breaking sequence. And that would be a good segue into describing my personal experience of the ending, but I still have to set it up a little, by describing the game’s layers.

The game’s puzzle content has four known layers. (There may be more that haven’t been discovered yet.) The first and most obvious layer is just playing the game, collecting four flames that let you into an endgame area that gets you to an ending, where the credits scroll by over a fireworks display. This is reasonably solvable, and you could stop playing there, but it’s clear that this ending isn’t really the end — after the credits, you’re simply in the same place, with a key that lets you into a few previously-inaccessible rooms, notably including a sort of home for your character, but still doesn’t actually get you out of the well.

The second layer involves finding 64 “Secret Eggs” to reach a second ending, where you finally escape to a second area exterior to the well. This is still reasonably completable by a solo player who’s avoiding spoilers, if they’re still enjoying the game and don’t feel like they’re done with it yet. I personally was such a player: I found all the eggs by myself, but then got stuck and had to seek hints on how to proceed from there, for reasons I will describe.

In addition to the 64 Secret Eggs, there are a number of Secret Bunnies, which, when found, go to the post-second-ending exterior area, letting you know that this is the goal of layer 3. Layer 3 is absolutely meant to be a community project. A solo player will be able to find a few bunnies, but there’s one that requires at least fifty different players to share information, and others that are simply so obscure that they might as well require fifty players.

Notably, the first three layers intermingle. By the time you reach the first ending, you’ve definitely found some eggs. If you’ve explored thoroughly enough to find all the eggs, you’ve inevitably picked up a few of the easier bunnies as well. The fourth layer isn’t like that. It involves performing difficult and/or unmotivated actions like eating 100 healing fruits while your health is already full or speedrunning to the second ending in under 60 minutes. The developers have said that they didn’t expect this layer to ever be fully completed, but the player community managed it anyway.

So, now I can tell my spoiler-laden tale about what happened to me in the endgame. Just before the first ending, there’s a bit where you have to open a door by pressing a four buttons at the ends of mazy passageways in a four-room block, while pursued by a floating black scary ghost-cat-thing. I’ve since learned that it’s officially called the Manticore, but this name does not appear in the game; there’s very little text in the game, the better to let the player figure stuff out on their own. The Manticore periodically attacks you with hard-to-avoid eye-beams that reflect off walls, and the button state resets if you die, so this is a very high-pressure situation — especially if, like me, you’re not very good at the platformy bits and prefer to bypass obstacles with cleverness. And so that’s what I did here. By means of a magic flute, I could teleport to the safety of a hub room every time I successfully pressed one of the buttons, and from there, find some fruit to heal up and a save point to lock in that button press before attempting another. In this way, I pressed all four buttons. Once the door is open, you can go through it without going through the area that triggers the Manticore to start chasing you, so getting to the fireworks and the first ending was a snap.

I proceeded to find all the eggs, even the one that nearly everyone misses, which is another story of my own cleverness, but I’ll spare you for now. Along the way, I found a hidden room to the left of the Manticore area, glimpsing it from a roundabout passageway that didn’t provide access to its contents. Figuring out how to get into that room while the Manticore chased me was a little tricky, but manageable. It turned out that the throne-like thing in the center was called an Incubator — clearly linked to all the eggs! — and there was another room to the left of the Incubator room, containing what looked like a door with the Manticore’s face on it. So at this point, my theory about how things were going to proceed was this: I would find all the eggs, and I would put them in the Incubator, and then something would happen, possibly the hatching of a new being capable of fighting the Manticore with me. Whatever happened, in the end the Manticore would be dead and the door would open.

This proved inaccurate in several ways. First, you don’t put all 64 eggs into the Incubator; getting them all gives you access to a special 65th egg, with the Manticore’s face on it, just like the door, and this is the thing you put in the Incubator. Second, putting the 65th egg in the Incubator didn’t do anything. “Maybe it takes a while to hatch”, I thought. And I tried waiting for it to hatch, but the Manticore kept killing me. And this is the point where I sought hints.

What I learned from the hints is that I had unintentionally broken sequence. The way it’s supposed to go is: After you press the four buttons and open the door (in a single sally, because you are skilled and brave), the Manticore chases you all the way to the first ending and is killed by the fireworks. Freed from the pressure of dodging its eyebeams, you find your way into the Incubator room, but can’t go any farther to the left, because the only thing that can break the blocks in the way (which didn’t even register as an obstacle to me) is the Manticore. And so you embark on a quest to find all the Secret Eggs to obtain the 65th egg, because it is a Manticore egg, and will hatch into a second Manticore. The “door” with the Manticore’s face on it is not related to this, and has a solution that’s fairly easy to find when you’re freely inspecting the place without getting killed all the time.

So, my first reaction is dismay — dismay that, through my cleverness, I had tricked myself out of what seemed like it would have been a more satisfying first ending, one where you actually defeat the final boss instead of just avoiding it. Then came the realization that I had hunted all those eggs for no actual purpose: all you need to get the second ending is a Manticore, and I still had my first one. The second ending also gets rid of the Manticore, but in my playthrough, I already had a Manticore egg in the Incubator when this happened, and when I returned there, it hatched. So I was only Manticore-free very briefly, and have no way to dispense with the one that remains.

At least the game takes into account the possibility of this happening, and doesn’t break completely. I know I’m not the only one to have had this experience, and I imagine speedrunners must do what I did on purpose.

Galaga: Destination Earth is old-school enough in its sensibilities that it extends its gameplay not by providing lots of content, but by making the player start over repeatedly. It’s like a coin-op arcade game in that respect, and, like a coin-op arcade game, doesn’t provide any way to save your progress. It provides a limited number of “credits” that let you continue from the beginning of the current stage instead of the beginning of the whole game if you run out of lives, but that’s as far as it goes. And even that may be inadvisable, for reasons I’ll get into.

That said, on the PC version, it’s pretty easy to cheat a little. (This may be the one way in which the PC version is superior to the Playstation version.) In the game’s main folder, there is a plain text file named “levels.txt”, containing nothing but a series of short strings in capital letters: SWRECK, SATURN, EUROPA, MARS, etc. Experiment shows that this does in fact govern the sequence of missions you go through, and that by editing the file you can skip straight to whatever mission you want. I’ve been severely stuck on the Moon mission, which has two sections that I find extremely difficult, and I’ve been taking advantage of this cheat to practice it without having to go through five other missions first.

But I probably won’t just cheat my way through the game like this and declare victory, and not just because it would feel illegitimate. That’s a factor, sure. But cheating is also impractical, because of the upgrade system.

See, every mission contains at certain points “merit medals” that you can consume. Some of them are just floating in open space where you can fly through them easily. Some are in difficult crannies that you have to go out of your way to reach and run the danger of crashing into stuff. Sometimes it’ll put a merit medal and a shield repair power-up level with each other, so that you can’t nab them both and have to choose which is more important to you. Most insidiously, sometimes it’ll put one immediately to the left of a solid barrier, so that you can only get it by destroying any ship you’ve captured. But you want to grab them anyway, at least at first, because for every ten merits you grab, you get some kind of permanent benefit.

Admittedly, some of the later merit tiers just award points, which seems kind of useless to me. I basically only care about the score when it has some tangible gameplay benefit, like providing extra lives or whatever. But the first three tiers actually unlock your starfighter’s full potential. At 10 merits, you get ability to Thrust, that is, to go faster. I haven’t actually figured out how to get any benefit from this, but it’s nonetheless something you can do that you couldn’t do before. 20 merits activates Maneuvers, which is to say, the ability to dodge-roll left and right. This is fairly useful for surviving barrages. At 30, the number of shots you can have on the screen at a time increases from two to three, and this is a very big deal, something you definitely don’t want to be without.

And if you start from the moon, you won’t be able to get enough merits to have any of those things by the difficult parts. This applies both when you start there because you cheated, and when you start there because you lost all your lives and used a credit.

Galaga: Destination Earth is pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum from Robotron X when it comes to faithfulness to the source. It’s not even really in the same genre as the original Galaga. Galaga was a Space-Invaders-like, a fixed-camera shmup where you move left and right at the bottom of the screen and shoot at enemies in a grid formation above you, and G:DE is only intermittently that. It varies the perspective: at the start of a wave, you might hear a computery voice announce “ATTACK PATTERN DELTA” or whatever, followed by the camera shifting. Attack pattern gammaa is Space Invaders view, attack pattern delta is side-scrolling, and attack pattern alpha is a 3D “over-the-shoulder” view with a reticle to line up your shots. What happened to attack pattern beta? Well, there is in fact a fourth perspective: the fully first-person stationary-but-swiveling view you get in the occasional deck gun sections. So maybe that’s attack pattern beta, but if so, it’s not announced.

But attack pattern alpha is the primary view, the one where you spend the majority of the game, swooping through open space or various tunnels, canyons, and other obstacle-filled environments. Thus does the game reveal its real inspirations. It doesn’t want to be a sequel to Galaga, it wants to be a sequel to Rebel Assault.

There’s one other game I’ll cite as an influence, albeit a lesser one: Gyruss. This is a semi-obscure space shmup that’s kind of like a less-abstract Tempest: you move around the edges of a circular playfield with a rotary controller and shoot towards a distant center. Gyruss had a theme of journeying towards Earth from the outer solar system, starting at “2 warps to Neptune”, and G:DE‘s progression immediately reminded me of it. Mind you, it isn’t a strict progression from outer planets to inner ones here. You start at a shipwreck in open space, then proceed to Saturn, then Europa, Mars, then you leap to the surface of the sun (!), then the moon, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Apparently the next level is in Earth orbit, followed by the surface. So you may say that any Gyruss connection on that basis is tenuous. But there’s also a section in the Europa mission where you fly down some circular tunnels, hugging the edge, and it plays so much like Gyruss that it has to be deliberate imitation.

What does the game get from actual Galaga, then? First and most obviously, the insect-like aliens (or are they just aliens in insect-like spacecraft?) Apparently they’re not quite aliens this time, having a complicated and somewhat silly backstory involving fruit flies, nanomachines, and time travel that’s hinted at in the intro and spelled out more fully in the manual. Then there’s Galaga‘s one distinctive game feature. Not the aliens that break formation and dive at you — that had been previously pioneered by Galaxian. (Yes, that’s a different game, albeit by the same developers.) No, I’m talking about the boss aliens that can capture your starfighters with a tractor beam and use them against you. Skilled Galaga players would deliberately let their first ship get captured, because you could then retake it, with the result that you have two starfighters on the screen at once, doubling your firepower. G:DE keeps those mechanics, but also extends them. Sometimes destroyed bosses will drop energy cubes that, if you catch them, let you fire a tractor beam of your own, capturing alien ships to fly beside you and fire at your command. I haven’t been consistently able to make this happen, but when I do, it makes subsequent waves a great deal easier — moreso than even a second starfighter, because two ships that fire differently can cover more area. The main problem is that the captured ships are so fragile. Your own starfighter has shields that let it take multiple hits (which is another deviation from the original), but your captives do not. I feel like I could get a lot farther in the game if I could just keep them alive longer.

My success in applying DxWnd to Robotron X inspired me to give it a try on one of the more recalcitrant games of its ilk, Galaga: Destination Earth. To my surprise, it simply worked immediately, without needing to set it up in DxWnd at all! This was not my experience six years ago. But that was before several Windows Updates and a couple of major hardware upgrades. Had my system simply grown out out of the problem? Maybe.

It wasn’t completely working correctly, though. The FMV intro didn’t play, and the background music, which was supposed to loop, would instead play just once and then stop. I can do without the FMV — I’ve seen the intro before, and the rest of the video clips in the game seem inessential, just some brief establishing shots at the start of each mission. It’s all viewable in VLC outside of the game, and I’ve done the same for other games before. Playing without the music, on the other hand, greatly detracts from the experience. It’s not that it’s amazing music, really. It’s a competent soundtrack for an extended action scene. But that’s something that the game really needs.

Now, I didn’t mention this in my writeup of Robotron X, but it had exactly the same problem with background music, and I solved it there. The cause: both games play their background music from the CD, and apparently Windows just dropped the ability to play CD-audio tracks on loop back in Windows Vista. DxWnd to the rescue! All I had to do is extract the tracks to Ogg Vorbis files and configure DxWnd to emulate CD playback with those. And so I wound up using DxWnd for Galaga after all.

Convincing DxWnd to actually run the game proved more difficult than it should have been. Apparently it has problems with filenames containing spaces, which strikes me as a pretty glaring oversight, considering that it requires you to give it the full path to the executable, and Windows likes to install stuff to a folder called “Program Files”. I had to copy the game to a new folder called “C:\GAMES\GALAGA” before it would hook into it at all.

This done, I managed to reach mission 6 out of 10 in one night. I’ll describe the game itself in my next post. I’d kind of like to see if I can get the FMV working before finishing the game, though, even though I consider it inessential. Based on the logs, it looks like it’s still trying to get the video data from the CD, even though I have the files installed locally. I can believe that this is a problem in itself — that the Windows media library is giving up on waiting for the CD drive to respond while it’s still trying to spin up, or something like that. And if that’s the problem, it seems like it should be solvable.

Badly in need of distraction yesterday, I turned to Robotron X in earnest. I seemed to hit a wall between levels 30 and 40, though. Things just get a whole lot tougher there. Which is a shame, because that’s also where it starts turning up the variety. Levels 30-39 are the “Electrode Forest”, where the electrodes (stationary deadly obstacles) are shaped like abstracted pine trees and take 30 shots to destroy instead of just one. Levels 30-49 are the “Beam Maze”, where post-shaped electrodes are placed at grid points and periodically fire deadly arcs at their neighbors — something that has less effect than it sounds, because the posts are easily destroyed, so that it all just turns into an empty space from stray fire before long. There are a few other variations along these lines as you progress.

But like I was saying, I was stuck. You can last indefinitely if you’re gaining lives faster than you’re losing them, and I wasn’t doing that. I turned to something like save-scumming — I don’t know if this really fits the definition of that term; I usually think of save-scumming as repeatedly reloading a save until the random number generator provides your preferred outcome, and that’s not what I was doing. Rather, I was reloading my last save every time I died, and saving if I completed a level without dying at all. In this way, I hoped to build up enough lives to survive. But playing this way is laborious, less fun, and, most importantly, violates the spirit of the game. So I finally, reluctantly, turned the difficulty down to Easy.

Easy mode is so much easier than Normal that it almost seems like a different game. No scumming was needed here — the only reason I ever needed to save was to shut down the game for a while and give my fingers a break. I don’t know how many lives I ended the game with, but it was more than the ten that it’s capable of displaying. I feel like I might someday decide that I haven’t really finished the game, that Easy mode doesn’t count because it isn’t the experience that the developers intended. But then, I’m not sure that the experience that the developers intended includes finishing the game. It’s not like the ending is particularly climactic, or wraps up the story or anything. You just play a level like any other, then there’s a rather tongue-in-cheek cutscene, and that’s that.

A few more stray observations and I’ll call it finished:

The last level is actually level 199. There are more than 200 levels, though, because just before every level divisible by 20, there’s a bonus level where you try to shoot at stuff for points but can’t be killed, just like the bonus levels in various spaceship shmups. I speculate that this pattern is the reason we don’t get a level 200. Also, the second hundred are kind of a repeat of the first hundred: just as levels 30-39 are Electrode Forest levels, so are levels 130-139, and so forth. If you get to the midpoint, you’ve basically seen everything. This again makes me think that the devs weren’t designing for completists.

There are no bosses, exactly, but level 3 Brain robotrons are fairly bosslike. They tower over the other robotrons, they take 50 hits to kill, and there are never more than two of them on a level. If that’s a level 3 Brain, what’s a level 4 Brain like? It’s nothing but a huge brain that crawls on the floor like a slug. I appreciate the sense of progression from “humanoid with oversized brain” to “oversized humanoid with even more oversized brain” to “we can’t support the humanoid part any more, here’s just a brain”, but it does make it the one case where a higher-level robotron is less powerful than its predecessor.

I mentioned before that the game spreads out the spawning of enemies, teleporting in new ones over the course of a level to draw things out. I’m fairly sure now that this is linked to progress in shooting stuff, rather than merely timed. There are sections in the Grunt waves where it really seems like it’s spawning new Grunts specifically to replace the ones I’ve killed. Perhaps it’s really a response to technical constraints, rather than being primarily a design decision? This is a game meant to run on 1996 hardware. If you want to throw hundreds of enemies at the player, but can’t render that many 3D robotron models all at once, spawning new ones as you go is the best you can do.