The Stack

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 it’s 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.