The Stack

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. 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.