Pong and Beyond

158th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1979
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco

So here we go – game one of what I’ve unofficially dubbed our weekend of shoot ’em ups. We’ve got lots of them to do for the blog, and many are fairly quick and straight forward, so it’s easier to do a few in batches – saves us time and gets them done – according to our stats, we should do 12 of them before #200 if we want to keep on target (and there was you telling me earlier in the supermarket not to fixate on those stats).  I doubt we will, but we should probably try.

Galaxian looks like a fairly straightforward shooter, but I’ve not played it, so let’s see what happens…

Our Thoughts

Right, at first glance this seems to be a colourful Space Invaders, but that changes soon after. Rather than the unrelenting march of Space Invaders – digging down slowly while shooting at you – the enemies fly at you, leaving you not just dodging those bullets, but also the creatures themselves, who, after their assault, run back to formation to repeat their attack later. They look like giant galactic bugs… so you are fighting the very pixellated minions of the giant wasp from DoDonPachi.

This adds to the game’s challenge, leaving you running around a lot more. The aliens may not shoot from formation, giving some more predictability, but the speed with which some of the creatures attack more than makes up for that. The different attack patterns from some of them make it even more difficult.

Beyond that, graphics and sounds have improved slightly, but not really by all that much, so besides the colours, there’s not much to say. Sorry folks, expect to find a write-up almost quadruple this length when we get around to writing up Heavy Rain.

In the end, yeah, a lot like Space Invaders, but suitably improved, so that’s all good.

Final Thoughts

I like these games because they are easy to write and easy to find. To be honest if you type Galaxian into any search engine you are bound to find a decent version of it online. Just be wary of some of them since there are many Space Invader clone games with a Galaxian skin.