But it's possible to destroy your own captured fighter if you're not careful, and shooting the boss Galaga when it's not attacking makes the fighter turn on you. If you have no fighters left, the game ends.
Galaga nes mac emulator free#
With one of your remaining fighters, you must shoot the boss, as it dives, to free your kidnapped fighter. If your fighter gets caught in its field, the alien takes it to the top of the screen. Every so often, a boss Galaga descends and releases a tractor-beam. What makes Galaga unique is its "double-fire" feature. Destroying one of these temporarily weakens the entire Galaga fleet. The Galaga bosses are the toughest - they need to be shot at twice. The Galaga bees are the trickiest, for they swirl around in loops, and at higher levels will mutate into three aliens.
The Galaga spiders weave side to side as they come down. This gives you the opportunity to destroy them before they can assemble into a powerful attack formation. They swarm onto the screen in groups before diving for your fighter. In deep space, your starfighter is under the missile and suicide attack of the Galaga, a strange alien race who look like insects. Mostly, you pound the fire button until your fingers bleed. Very little strategy or thought is involved. However, you should keep in mind that this type of game isn't for everyone. Good stuff! The only problem with the music is that there isn't enough of it. In fact, one jazz piece, played during an intermediate screen, is good enough to tape for later playback in your car. Games for the TurboGrafx-16 seem to feature unusually good music, and Galaga '90 doesn't break that tradition. Of course, the double and triple ships are wider than the single version and so make better targets for the opponent. With these high-powered fighters, you can spray the screen with destruction as you try to rid the world of the Galaga corps. A single fighter may be used or the fighters may be combined into double-and triple-shot crafts. Your fighter, just like the creatures against which you must battle, is capable of taking on different forms. These capsules allow you to warp to different "dimensions", where you can earn bonus points and fight a different class of enemy. Sometimes a creature or obstacle on the screen will, when hit, leave behind a blue capsule for you to scoop up. However, when you first play, you'll be so busy watching the aliens' antics, you'll forget to man your guns. You need to be quick on the controller to stay clear of both them and their fire. Once all a wave's creatures are on the screen, the creatures break from their ranks and swoop down upon you, sometimes transforming into different shapes. When hit, some creatures explode with an effect not unlike a Fourth of July fireworks display. The attacking creatures flow onto the screen in circular and zigzag patterns, before regrouping into lines across the top. With Galaga '90 you won't play for the highest score rather, you'll try to last long enough to see as many of the stunning animations as possible. Galaga 90 is most definitely a worthy addition to your video-game library. Now it's 1990 - gad, where did the '80s go? - and Galaga has been updated to meet the high standards of today's competitive video-game market, the result being an addictive and inventive space-battle contest that's guaranteed to please any shoot-'em-up fan. Now the aliens could really fight back they didn't have to stay in their neat little rows, but instead they could swoop down upon the player's gun in dizzying spirals and loops, firing all the way. Galaga took Space Invaders' basic idea and transformed it from a relatively static shooting gallery into an inventive, visually appealing fast-action blastathon, the likes of which had never been seen before at that time.