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.

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.

Since Ultimate Spider-Man showed a very similar reluctance to run under Windows 10 as Galaga: Destination Earth, it seemed plausible that the cause might be the same: DRM. Specifically, USM uses SafeDisc, which Windows 10 considers to be a security violation. I still don’t know if that’s the case or not. I haven’t found a nocd crack for Galaga online. I did find some general instructions for circumventing SafeDisc on Windows 10 by downloading and signing a driver in administrator mode, but it didn’t seem to help. Maybe Galaga instead uses SecuROM, another DRM system that Windows 10 doesn’t like, with a bigger reputation as a security risk, widely accused of flat-out being a rootkit. Or maybe the problem was never really DRM at all.

Regardless, it seems like my best bet is still to set up a Windows 98 machine, which is something I kind of want to do anyway for the sake of other games. But in the course of searching for nocd cracks, I discovered another option: archive.org has the Playstation version of Galaga: Destination Earth available to play online. And I did play that for long enough to get through the first level, but I won’t be continuing there. The sound is unbearably choppy in my browser, just constantly cutting in and out, and the resolution is significantly below what I’m willing to accept for this game. That is, it’s probably 256×224, designed for a standard definition television with a certain amount of blur. I’m not really very demanding about resolution. 800×600 is plenty for me in a game designed around 3D graphics, like this one. I might even get used to 256×224. But the sound is a real deal-breaker.

At least I did legitimately play it for a little while, though!

For the last couple of days, my Twitter feed has been all agog over the new Spider-Man game for the PS4. I don’t have a PS4, but I do have an open-world Spider-Man game I haven’t finished: Ultimate Spider-Man (Treyarch, 2005). I recall playing just the start of it back in 2006, in the last days before this blog. I’m not sure why I didn’t play more. Possibly I found the open world intimidating. Or maybe the framerate was slow and I wanted to wait to play it on a faster machine — it had to have been pretty demanding at the time.

Running it on Windows 10 was a little difficult. It installs without apparent problems, but the game itself simply exits immediately, much like Galaga: Destination Earth did. But USM is apparently a better-loved game than G:DE, because I was easily able to find an explanation online, if not a solution, via pcgamingwiki.com. It’s all down to the DRM. USM uses SafeDisc DRM, which apparently doesn’t work on Windows 10 for security reasons, just like SecuROM. Fortunately, I was able to find a reputable-looking no-CD crack on the web. Windows 10 doesn’t much like the security implications of running random programs downloaded from the internet either, but at least it’s willing to ask me about it instead of just shutting the thing down automatically. When I’m through with this, I’ll have to give G:DE another look and see if it’s using SafeDisc or SecuROM too. If it is, it’s conceivable that I could hack around it.

One other problem: some of the cutscenes glitch up the screen badly. Only a few of them, though, and it hasn’t been an impediment to understanding what’s going on, so I’m putting up with it.

I’ve played for a few hours, and it’s already feeling repetitive. To some extent, that’s my fault. I could propel the plot forward faster than I’ve been doing. It’s just that it’s fun to just swoop around exploring, and there’s a lot of stuff clamoring for Spidey’s attention in New York: tokens to collect, timed web-swinging races, “combat tours” where you follow an arrow and beat up gang members. Those all have GTA3 equivalents, but there’s one more type of collectible: “events”, which is what the game calls it when a citizen needs your help. A red spot appears on the mini-map, and when you reach it, you find a woman menaced by hoodlums, or a getaway car fleeing a robbery, or a man dangling precariously from a ledge. You can hardly refuse those, can you? But the game seems to have only so many event types, so they get repeated a lot.

The game doesn’t entirely give a choice, either. Before you can go to the next plot-advancing checkpoint, you have to meet a quota of “city goals”, which is to say, a minimum count of tokens, races, combat tours, and events. Your totals carry over, however, and I’m currently well ahead of the requirements on all points except combat tours. I suspect that it’s calibrated so that you don’t really have to grind the goals, that you’ll meet the minimal requirements just by doing the things you happen to come across on your way to the Daily Bugle or whatever.

Between spider-missions, there are bits where you play as Venom. I’ll talk about him in my next post.

Sometimes, you really have to regard retrogaming as a journey-not-the-destination thing. I don’t for a minute believe that the experience of finally playing Galaga: Destination Earth will justify the effort I’ve been putting into it. The only experience that can justify that effort is the experience of the effort itself.

When last we left off, I had more or less given up on running this game on my usual gaming machine, even in emulation. So this weekend, I dug some older hardware out of the closet. First up was my previous rig, in an ingeniously-designed compact case made by Shuttle. It turned out to be completely intact — the last time I upgraded, I upgraded everything. Once I hooked it up to a monitor and keyboard, it booted into Windows XP without problems — it grumbled about the CMOS, due to the battery being run down, but automatically figured out what hardware it had anyway. G:DE made no claim that it would work on XP, but I figured it was worth a try anyway, because at least it was a 32-bit OS and I had vague memories of its compatibility mode being more reliable. Well, no dice. It had exactly the same problems as under Windows 10. I contemplated downgrading the system to Windows 98, but gave up when it failed to recognize my Win98 install CD as bootable. Just as well. I can imagine a working XP machine being useful someday.

Going back another generation took a little more work. My pre-Shuttle mid-sized tower case was missing a graphics card — presumably because I had transplanted it into the Shuttle box when I first got it. But I found a suitable disused one in a box of loose cards. It’s very likely the one I had removed from this machine in the first place. Strange how upgrading graphics cards used to be such a routine part of gamer life, but at this point I haven’t bothered in years. Getting it in was a little awkward, due to the case coming from an era before people got case design really figured out. Oh, it was fairly innovative for its day — the motherboard is mounted on a section that slides out for easier access. But “easier” is relative, and the device’s innards are almost inevitably an intestinal tangle of cables, just because that’s how things were back then.

Once it was up and booting, the machine reminded me that it no longer considered its copy of Window XP to be valid and would not me log in. Which is fine, I suppose, seeing how I really intended to install Windows 98 anyway. But, as with the Shuttle box, it wouldn’t boot from the Win98 install CD. Was it even bootable at all? Perhaps not; apparently some Win98 install CDs are, and some aren’t. When I had been trying to get Windows 98 running under emulation, I downloaded a Win98 install CD that I know to be bootable, because I booted it in the emulator, but burning it to a disc failed to produce a bootable CD. Apparently Microsoft disabled the ability to burn bootable CDs back in Windows 7, probably to make it harder to pirate Windows.

But there was always an alternative to booting from the CD: booting from a floppy disk.

This machine actually still had a 3.5-inch floppy drive mounted in it, albeit not connected. After I connected it, I found that the machine seemed no longer capable of getting through its startup sequence. It would get to the point of displaying “Press DEL to configure, TAB to continue with POST”, but no keypresses would get it to do anything more. I almost called it quits right there, but after taking a break, I realized that the only plausible explanation for this change in behavior was that I had wiggled or jostled something in the case while plugging in the floppy cable. Giving all socketed items a thorough additional wiggle solved the problem.

I’m a little surprised that my collection of floppies have survived as well as they have, considering how long it’s been since I’ve used them. Every bootable disk I’ve tried has booted successfully, including the Windows 98 Startup disk. But this leads to an immediate additional roadblock. Every bootable floppy I own boots to some kind of command line or prompt that requires keyboard input to do anything. And, although the BIOS knows how to get input from a USB keyboard, these programs do not. I have a USB-to-PS/2 adapter. I have several, in fact. But it turns out that these adapters only work on USB keyboards that know how to use them. I’m fairly sure I had a PS/2 keyboard around not so many years ago, but got rid of it because it was taking up space and collecting dust and didn’t fit into a neat little box the way those graphics cards did. The lesson here is clearly to never throw away anything.

And there, for now, I stand. My options going forward include figuring out how to burn a bootable Windows 98 install CD and hoping that it’ll recognize the keyboard once it’s into the install process, or gaining access to a PS/2 keyboard for long enough to do the install. My options do not include, obviously, giving up.

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.