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Playing arcade versions of Galaxian and then for comparison some of its follow-up, Galaga, in MAME 0.267 and MAME 0.130, respectively. Extracted and converted these ROMs from the PS2 disc for Namco Museum 50th Anniversary, using scripts from https://github.com/arpruss/xsr
(The Galaga ROM from Namco Museum 50th Anniversary (PS2) can run in up to MAME 0.130; the ROM from Arcade Game Series Galaga (PC/Steam) can only run in up to MAME 0.119.)
Galaxian's emphasis is more on one-on-one--or one-on-three--duels, bullet dodging, and precision shooting, whereas Galaga's is on wave memorization and shot speed. Galaga is much faster! And its enemies' shots lob sideways, more easily boxing you into / catching you in corners. I'm not good at memorization, I like the feeling of dueling and shot-dodging (I suppose that like a lot of Galaxian comes from Taito's Space Invaders!)--and I get a bit bored by Galaga's constant, lengthy, and memorization-heavy bonus stages--so I'm leaning Galaxian-style!
Galaxian also seems to have a more interesting evolution of enemy behaviors over the course of a stage. First, you learn that the different colors of enemies have different movement patterns, with my current scourges being the purple ones, who can dive in very wide back and forth horizontal sweeps threatening a large part of your ship's movement range. The other ships mostly have less wide-ranging dive patterns, but as time passes in a stage--or maybe its as the number of enemies dwindles, I'm not sure--but enemies can also just sweep offscreen and disappear from the stage on their own eventually, possibly in scorn over my lack of marksmanship! (I seem to have an uncanny knack for placing shots that fly harmlessly right up through the narrow gap between the columns of ships in the huge enemy formation ; D)--enemies of all colors gradually move into wider and wider-ranging dive patterns, making them increasingly more dangerous and hard to hit!
And Galaxian doesn't have any of Galaga's "let aliens capture my ship so I can capture it back so I finally have enough firepower to perfect the bonus stages but now it's way harder to dodge anything" rigmarole to worry about.
Galaxian's sound FX as heard in Namco Museum Vol. 3 on PS1 sounded like slightly simpler Galaga sounds, kinda standard bleeps and bloops--Galaga makes them sing a bit more--but in this ROM played in MAME they have an entirely different, atmospheric quality, with a deep WHOOSH surrounding the player's shot, for instance, making it feel like a real event each time you launch a projectile. Pretty fantastic!
(On PS1, it's Namco Museum Vol. 3 that has Galaxian, and Vol. 1 that has Galaga. Went back and tried that Galaga out after recording this MAME Galaga and yep, I do like the closer-range action of that one's optional "Panorama" screen mode better than the arcade version's long vertical screen. : D PS1 Galaxian doesn't have that mode though, and doesn't have the awesome whooshy SFX this ROM from Namco Museum 50th Anniversary (PS2) has!) |
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Feeling like I can keep improving with practice. : ) They did a good job of keeping you on your toes with a variety of AI behaviors. |
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