Galaga Destination Earth

During one of my misadventures, we were driving across the hot and dusty desert when we came across a small nameless thrift shop in the middle of nowhere. I was just looking for something to drink, but to my surprise this hole in the wall actually had some video games too. A small stack of original xbox games, some ps2 sports games, and some cases that appeared to be ps1 games. I rummaged through the stack and found Galaga: Destination Earth. No manual, no label, just a cracked plastic case with a disk inside. “How much for the game?” I asked the guy behind the counter. “I dunno, hows about $1?”
“SOLD!”

Without thinking twice, I gave the man his dollar and was out the door quicker than I had arrived. It’s not that hole-in-the-wall places in the middle of nowhere scare me, it’s just that…yeah, they scare the living bejeebers outta me for reasons too extensive to list in this post…which is supposed to be a game review. Moving right along!

When I got home the game sat in my bag until I finally found some time today to pick it up and play. Let me tell you, this ain’t your momma’s Galaga!
No sir, this is a completely new take on the entire series.

The opening sequence recaps the occurrences of the first game in a lengthy cut scene. After the events of the original Galaga, humans won the war against the aliens and everything was good, that is until humans decided that they wanted to colonize space. Guess where they wanted to colonize? In the area where the aliens were coming from. Oh yeah, fantastic idea! Let’s piss off and attempt to take over the territory of our enemies after years of peace for no particularly good reason. Who feels like another war?! YEEHAW! Needless to say, the aliens aren’t happy and you’re sent in to uh, save people or something. It’s kind of ass backwards story-wise.

The controls are similar to the original; just move and shoot, move and shoot. Simple right? Wrong! The first wave is classic, you just shoot them as you would in the original arcade game, enemies above, but then shit hits the fan. This game, as a shooter, doesn’t know what it wants to be. Your camera is constantly changing perspectives with each wave. One minute you’ll be in a side scrolling perspective, the next you’ll be in a tunnel shooter, then it’s a rail shooter, then back to the tunnel perspective, all while you’re trying to shoot enemies and avoid projectiles as well as space debris. This may sound cool in theory, I mean, Einhander got it right, but this game does it all wrong. When you’re in the the tunnel shooter parts of the stages (which is a majority of the time) you’ll find yourself flailing around trying to figure out the difference between up and down, and where the aliens are at in relation to your ship. I’ll remind you this is a PS1 game so the graphics are a little bit, how you say, confusing. Well, the graphics were pretty good for the ps1 in general as far as the look goes, but it’s really hard to tell the distance between you and an enemy. They fly all around the screen, get closer and farther away, but you can never really tell where they are in relation to your ship so sometimes you’ll run into them, other times you’ll miss shooting them all together. This game has serious depth perception issues and it’s extremely frustrating.

Another thing that really pissed me off was the shooting speed. Your ship fires so slow that you could literally get up and grab a snack or two before you’d need to press the shoot button again. It’s that bad. There are power ups that you can pick up but they don’t seem to do anything at all. There’s also health packs. Yes, health packs in a Galaga game. Unlike the original, you don’t die if you get hit, you have a health bar in the top left of your screen. You will need every ounce of that health and the 3 additional ships you’re given to make any progress in the game at all due to the terrible muddled messes that make up each level.

Another fun addition to the game, and they might have been going somewhere with this, is that each new level gives you objectives or missions that you must finish to complete the level. These, however, aren’t fun at all because of the depth issues. Take for instance levels where you have to collect a certain number of an item. It’s kind of hard when you’re constantly screaming at your tv screen like an idiot, “WTF?! I TOTALLY HIT THAT! UGH!”.

Because down is up and up is down and it still doesn’t matter at all because this game has problems and wants to take it out on you. Because it hates you. It hates you because it knows that it will never be as good as the original. It makes everyone else around it suffer because IT suffers. This game is terrible and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Galaga: Destination Earth gets a 4/10

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