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Playing M2's demake of Namco's Galaga sequel arcade shooter Gaplus for the NES (and Famicom, probably?), extracted from the Steam version of Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 with MArchiveBatchTool and played in Mesen!
This didn't charm me immediately like the Famicom Galaga from Volume 2 did; Gaplus feels like a bunch of ideas jumbled together in an uninspired attempt to follow up on the huge hit that was Galaga. Moving up and down the screen, juggling ships in bonus stages, and additional powerup systems aren't really all that fun here, and the horrific speed of the enemies in some stages is stressful, in contrast to the blissful Famicom Galaga. Even the sound effects are just kinda bad this time around, and the stage restarting when you die just sucks. Dang.
On a technical level though the 2020 port--a new NES game in 2020!--by M2 is very impressive. Makes me wonder if Gaplus didn't get a port back in the day (it came out in the arcade in '84, a year before the Galaga Famicom port and FOUR YEARS BEFORE the Galaga NES port) because it was thought to be too graphically intense to replicate on the home hardware, or just because Namco didn't think it would sell as well as Galaga.
Huh so at 7:00 I MISSED ramming the queen ship or whatever it is, and got rammed by a regular enemy ship right after the queen flew offscreen with her powerup--but then my ship still transformed to the faster-shooting version! Huh! I'd thought you have to ram the queen specifically. |
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