Galaga : Destination Earth
Ah, 2000ad, the dawn of the new millenium. Surely no better time to look back in time and reflect on some of the wonderful games that make up our arcade heritage? Evidently, somebody at Hasbro Interactive thought so, and what better an arcade game to receive a makeover than the seminal Galaga.
Released in 1981, Galaga was an unofficial sequel to Galaxian, Namco's first venture into the shooter market. Galaga was oft bootlegged and the lucky recipiant of a number of fine sequels over the years. A historic legacy to live up to, surely Hasbro couldn't fuck it up that much?
Well, yes, they could and they did. With bells on, and a small hat.
Galaga: Destination Earth isn't just bad, it verges on criminal. The developers have somehow managed to take everything that made Galaga legendary and throw it out of the window. After all, nobody will mind if it bears little or no resemblance to Galaga, right? After all, people who love Galaga wouldn't want a game that keeps the spirit and essence of Galaga would they? Of course, readers, we know that they would. Someone at Hasbro didn't.
And thats how we ended up with Galaga: Destination Earth, a plague be upon it.
So, how did they manage to get a simple concept so monumentally wrong? Galaga:DE is based around 3 seperate “attack patterns” as Hasbro liked to define them, the originally titled “Gamma”, “Alpha” and “Delta”. 3 different attack patterns doesn't sound too bad does it? But Hasbro are lying to you. What they meant to say was “3 seperate viewpoints”, not attack patterns.
Or roughly translated: We've got 3d hardware and we're not afraid to use it.
There's nothing especially wrong about shifting a game into 3d provided its handled well, Galaga:DE wouldn't know handling well if it came up and kicked it in the nuts.
The Gamma stage is the closest you'll come to the look and feel of the original game. A slight tilted perspective with the alien swarms mimicing the original coin ops wave patterns. But, there's no challenge – its just incredibly easy to wipe out everything on the screen without blinking. Unfortunately, once you've passed the Gamma stage – any resemblance to the Galaga that you know and love disappears. The game then flits between the Alpha and Delta stages, the Alpha stage being a sideview scroller in Gradius style and the Delta stage, well, thats a first person perspective shooter a la Starfox.
Neither of which really belong in a game bearing the Galaga name.
It might have took some of the pain out of the game if either of the alternate attack pattern stages had been at least half decent in the first place. But they're not, each stage is as uninspired as the last, a four year old with co-ordination trouble could still breeze through each stage without a scratch as predictable wave after predictable wave of unimaginative alien craft meander forth in patterns that you've seen and played through a million times better in other games.
And so the game goes on, tediously repeating the same tricks. With no playability that your intrepid reporter could notice. And your reporter stuck it out for a tedious hour upon last play, because sometimes, you just need convincing that something can't really be that poor.
There's just too many things fundamentally wrong with the game design and so obviously so little love shed upon its creation that it deserves to be held up to all potential game remakers as a textbook method in how not to do things.
What it doesn't deserve, is to bear the Galaga name.
Hasbro should be ashamed of themselves.