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 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.

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.

For reasons I won’t describe here, the team I’m currently on at work recently declared a month-long internal Galaga competition, planned to be the first of a series of contests around different classic arcade games. Well, it’s not without precedent for managers to officially sanction non-work-related recreational gaming. I’m unlikely to win, but I’ve been playing a little every day, and have managed to reach scores that aren’t too entirely embarrassing. But more importantly, after a few days of this, I remembered: Wasn’t there a Galaga remake on the Stack? One of those classic arcade remakes from around 2000, with 3D models and power-ups added?

Indeed there was. Galaga: Destination Earth, a largely-forgotten title for Windows 95/98 and the original Playstation. I have the Windows version, which is unfortunate, because it doesn’t work any more. I vaguely recall that it had some problems back when I first played it, too — graphics glitches and whatnot — but on my current system, although the installer runs without problems, the game itself exits shortly after starting, or sometimes just hangs, without displaying anything on the screen in either case. And that’s a pretty hard problem to solve.

Playing with compatibility modes did nothing but sometimes make it display an error message: “The application was unable to start correctly”. Googling this, I found that it could be the result of a failure to load a DLL — but which DLL? I installed a program from Microsoft called “Process Monitor” to find out, only to learn that galaga.exe was not itself reporting any failures. It was apparently just deciding of its own accord to not run.

I tried looking online for help, but this is not a well-loved game, and therefore not a well-supported one. Hasbro Interactive’s tech support website doesn’t seem to exist any more. Pcgamingwiki.com, an inestimable source of game fixes, had nothing. One disreputable-looking patch site claimed to have a fix, although it wasn’t specific about what problems it fixed. Once downloaded, it was easy to identify as just a malware installer.

As of this writing, the most extreme measure I’ve tried is installing Windows 98 under an emulator to run it there. (I still have my old Win98 installer CD, and its sleeve with the license key on it!) This hasn’t worked any better so far, but there may be a better emulator out there. And if there isn’t, I can try to put together a real Windows 98 machine out of hoarded parts, like I’ve been planning ever since starting this blog. Or, alternately, I can buy a copy of the Playstation version on ebay for five bucks. But at this point, that would feel like giving up.

The galling part is that in the process of googling for help, I found some complaints that the game is too short — just a few hours long, apparently. I probably could have polished it off in 2001 if I had just played a little longer.