Deluxe Galaga (Amiga) - Part 2

Click this link for if you'd rather be reading the first half: Part one.

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Alright I'm on level 10 with a brand new Super Weapon to play with, time to see what this gun can do collect a Memory Station pick up.

Well this'll give me a chance to explain how the... nope, I just lost on the first square. Well, uh, okay then.

Here's how it was supposed to go. It's basically one of those games where you flip over cards and try to find the pairs. It's possible to find a bit of money here and then double it with a cash multiplier, but somehow I always manage to collect them the other way around and double my nothing. And this time I'm mostly just finding points it seems. You can't even imagine how enthusiastic I am about increasing my utterly meaningless score.

Well okay I'm sure I get extra lives every few hundred thousand or so, but I won't be getting those sort of numbers from here. I'd be better off digging up all five E X T R A letters.


LEVEL 14.

There you go, a proper demonstration of my Super Weapon in action; that's a proper gun right there that is. I even got an armour pick up out of that slaughter for an extra hit point! Armour is so rare in this, and when the pick ups do turn up they're usually dropping on the other side of the screen covered in bullets and with a wall of bullets in the way, so this is a great find for me.


LEVEL 23.

Finally! A promotion to lieutenant and a happy little tune to celebrate.

I cut out a bunch of stuff between getting the purple rank marker and the congratulations screen (watch the score jump), but after I finished with the next shop screen someone back at HQ noticed I had a full set of colours and gave me the promotion I deserved. Maybe someday I'll even figure out how being a higher rank benefits me.

Wait a second, I recognise this congratulations music. This is the game over theme from the Amiga version of Ghouls 'n Ghosts! (YouTube link). No wonder it sounds so good, that's a genuine Tim Follin track. Sounds better in this without the timer beeps though.


LEVEL 25: BIG TROUBLE.

Oh right, the game has boss fights! I'd forgotten about these. It's not quite bullet hell out here, but I'm sure given time I'll be able to fly right into a few of his shots, and time is definitely on his side. It's taking long enough to chip through his armour with this Super Weapon, so I'd hate to see what this is like with a double shot or worse.

Here's how the mothership in this compares with the enhanced AGA version and the super-upgraded pre-rendered 3D Warblade version, because comparing things is cool. In Warblade the boss turned up a few levels early and has a health bar, but it's still basically the same deal with the same arcs of spiky deathballs to dodge. I gotta say though, even though the 3D version likely took far longer to create, I think the pixel art has more charm to it.

Well that's finally over with! You can definitely see here how some colours fall faster than others, with white, purple and blue disappearing off screen before I even knew they were there. It's a good job I didn't see them though, as I might have dived into the last arc of bullets by mistake and gotten myself blown up too.

Like I ended up doing in Warblade.

Warblade (PC)

It wasn't my fault though! Red rank orbs look really similar to red death orbs, especially when they're all flying everywhere in a bonus explosion! It's a shame really, as up to this point the game has done an A grade job of making the bullets distinctive and visible.


LEVEL 27.

And now the proper Deluxe Galaga begins. The game's grown bored with me now and wants me to piss off.

I did have a couple of exits there to escape the rain of bullets, but I noticed them too late and it cost me my hard earned Super Weapon. There's no way to collect one of those guns in game by the way, they can only be bought in shops. Actually now that I think about it, it could be the reward for getting three skulls, but trying that at this stage would be kind of dumb.


LEVEL 28.

Uh... the continues only come with a single life each? I thought they were pretty useless before, seeing as they start me off with the weakest pea-shooter on a level full of armoured enemies, but now they seem utterly worthless.

Yeah, I really tried to kill these things with the single-shot, but their health bars lasted longer than my luck. It's certainly possible to make progress with this gun, but only for the patient.

Well I lasted 21 minutes in the end. Definitely not my worst time, though I have done better. In fact once I actually got hold of the War. I. Plasma and made it through one or two entire loops of the 75 stages. It never ends you see, it just keeps going forever, like a true arcade game.

Though really I was just holding on long enough to earn 3000 credits, get the best gun, and win the shop screen. Everything after that was just a bonus.

Warblade (PC)

Oh, here's the Warblade game over screen for comparison.

No really, that's the genuine game over screen, I'm not bullshitting you! Go download the demo, get blown up, you can see it for yourself. In motion!

Speaking of getting blown up, I should mention that there's a certain amount of memorisation necessary to avoid it happening to you, as the game is occasionally less than fair. On the plus side, the enemies don't actually collide with you when they suddenly come up from under the screen! But their bullets sure do.

And speaking of fairness... what the fuck is this:

Seriously? Like it's not already hard enough to get money in the game. Players rich enough to afford the best guns can actually blow it up and get showered with even more cash! But for me that money is just gone now, along with my hopes of getting the Super Weapon any time soon.


CONCLUSION

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I'm not really a big fan of shoot 'em ups, I generally find they get kind of tedious after a while, a bit relentlessly repetitive, so I'm the last person who should be passing judgement on what the best games in are. But Deluxe Galaga really does seem like it's one of the best shoot 'em ups on the Amiga. I mean the visuals might not be on the level of Amiga shoot 'em ups like Project X, Disposable Hero or Agony, but when the bullets are flying this is not an ugly game, and the speed of it puts 'respectable' shooters like Xenon 2 to shame.

It resembles a 1981 arcade game, but it's got far more variety and life to than the original Galaga, while being no less addictive. In Galaga you're stuck with your standard gun with a standard 'two bullets on screen at once' limit, fighting level after level of what may as well be the same group of enemies forever. Or at least to the point where I gave up on it anyway. I get why it's a classic, but I found it kind of dull to be honest.

Deluxe Galaga on the other hand has all kinds of secrets and power ups and rewards dropping from the sky, and that means a run is very reliant on chance. Players have to hold on as long as possible until fate drops them a bone in the form of a money bomb or a Memory Station or a Meteor Shower... some way to get the cash they need to get the upgrades. And then they just have to hope the coin ship doesn't come and empty out their wallet before they make it to the shop. Sure a skilled player could probably get through a loop of the game with just the standard single-shot gun, playing it Galaga-style, but those armoured aliens would take any fun out of that. Maybe that works out better in co-op though with the stronger player helping the weaker one get back up to speed.

Anyway consider this recommended to anyone who saw the screenshots and thought 'I wouldn't mind a go of that'.

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Comments are always welcome, especially if they're good ones. You could tell me what you think about Deluxe Galaga, my writings, this website in general, or maybe throw out a guess at what the next game will be. Or something even better than that!