Everyone who visits this site on a regular basis knows that I have enjoyed a number of the recent classic game re-releases. The games that I have enjoyed the most include Missile Command and Space Invaders, and Breakout. My favorite re-releases all have one thing in common; They all brought the sounds and graphics up to modern standards while retaining the same great gameplay of the original coin-op games. In my opinion, the best classic re-releases are the games that have not strayed away from the formula that made them great the first time.

Who doesn’t remember Galaga? Developed by Namco, the game was a fast-paced shooter that combined gameplay features from games like Space Invaders & Galaxian. Galaga was a classic that spawned several arcade sequels, and a great home version for the TurboGraphix-16.

In 1999, Hasbro Interactive licensed a number of classic coin-op games from Namco. Galaga: Destination Earth is the first of the Namco-licensed games to hit the streets. Developed by King of the Jungle & published by Hasbro Interactive, Galaga: Destination Earth has some features in common with the original coin-op game. On the whole, however, the game does not look or feel like the classic game we all know and love.

The game opens with some video depicting the "original" battle against the Galaga back in 1981. The video goes on to describe humanity exploring and colonizing the galaxy until they run into the Galaga for a second time. An earth colony ship unknowingly arrives at the homeworld of the Galagans, which triggers another war.

Once you select your options & start the game, you are presented with some more video. It depicts your space fighter flying by your huge colony ship. The colony ship is immense, and extremely detailed, and it takes a while for your ship to make its way along the exterior of this mammoth vessel. The first time I saw this animation, the animation reminded me a bit of the "Babylon 5" TV series.

However, once you get to the end of the colony ship, and you turn around the back of the base to cruise up the other side, you will notice that this side of the vessel is in flames. It is under attack by a number of bug-like creatures. It has been severely damaged, and is in danger of blowing up.

Once the video ends, your are whisked away to the first mission. Your goal is to destroy the enemy ships & save the colony ship. From there, you must stop each wave of alien attacks as the Galagans make their way back to Earth.

Galaga: Destination Earth is presented from three different perspectives: a top-down view, a third person view, and a side scrolling view. Missions are split between the different perspectives, and you are unable to choose which perspective to use while playing.

In all of the perspectives, you will have some indicators to keep an eye on. Take a look at the third-person perspective screen capture on the left. In the upper left hand corner of the screen is a gauge to show your shield strength. Unlike the original coin-op, you can take multiple hits in this game.

The lower left hand corner shows how many ships you have left. The lower right hand display shows what level you are currently on.

The top-down view is very similar to the original coin-op. The perspective has been tilted back ever so slightly, which gives the enemy ships a partial 3D appearance. Playing this part of the game is just like the original coin-op. Your ship is at the bottom, and the enemy ships are at the top. Your ship can move left & right while shooting up at the enemy ships. In my opinion, this is the most enjoyable part of Galaga: Destination Earth.

If you have ever played games like R-Type from Irem, you should be familiar with the side-scrolling mode. Your ship is on the left-hand side of the screen, and the enemy ships come at you from the right side.

The third person perspective reminds me of the StarFox games on the Nintendo systems. You view your ship from the rear, and a target receptacle helps you aim at the enemy ships. Movement isn’t restricted in this mode, as you can steer your fighter in eight different directions.

Screen captures of
Galaga: Destination Earth
Click on images to enlarge

There are a total of nine levels in the game, and each level consists of several stages. Included in the levels are a few of the "challenging stages" where mass quantities of alien’s buzz around the screen, and you must destroy as many as possible in the time allotted.

One of the best features of the original coin-op game was the dual-fire capability, and that feature has made its way into Galaga: Destination Earth. To use this feature, you have to allow one of your ships to be "captured" by an enemy tractor beam. Once you destroyed the enemy ship that kidnapped your fighter, your fighter would attach itself to another one of your fighters – thus doubling your firepower. Both ships move together -- shooting at the same targets.

At the same time, you now have the power to capture enemy ships. If you fly over a power crystal floating in space, a tractor beam is activated on your ship, allowing to capture one of the Galagans.

Despite the fact that the basic rules are similar to the original coin-op game, there have been a number of changes. For example, there are portions of the game where you can dock your ship with a high powered cannon in space. You have complete control to move the cannon around and pick off the aliens one by one.

In a major gameplay change, your fighter now has shields. You can take six hits from the enemy ships before you die. Along the way, you can pick up icons floating in space that will recharge your shields.

Enemy laser fire isn’t the only thing you need to avoid. Throughout the game, you will encounter all kinds of space debris, asteroids, and other objects. If your ship makes contact with an object in space, you will lose shield power.

Do you remember a classic coin-op game called Gyruss? In Galaga: Destination Earth, there is a portion of the game where you fly down a tunnel. Your ship can rotate around the exterior walls of the tunnel, and the Galaga ships attack you from the center. This part of the game is just like Gyruss.

Well now that I have covered the "good" parts of the game, let’s look at the "bad parts. Unfortunately, there is more "bad" in this game than "good."

To start off, the game would not work for me out of the box. Despite the fact that my system far exceeds the recommended specifications, the game simply would not work properly. The menus would come up fine, but once the game started, I would get a blank blue screen. I could hear music & sounds. If I hit the fire button and moved the joypad around, I could hear the explosions as I blindly picked off the enemy ships. However, no matter what I did, the screen was completely blank. I double & triple checked the recommended driver revisions for DirectX and my Voodoo3 3500 video card. Sure enough, everything was at the latest & greatest level. After repeated attempts over several days, Galaga "magically" started to work long enough to write this review. However, now it has reverted back to a blank blue screen when I try to play it, and I have no explanation as to why this is happening.

"The game would not work for me out of the box. Despite the fact that my system far exceeds the recommended specifications, the game simply would not work properly. The menus would come up fine, but once the game started, I would get a blank blue screen."

At first, I thought that the problem was with my system. However, a friend of mine picked this game up at the store, and he is experiencing a similar (but not completely identical) video problem. It has become clear to me that this game has not been properly tested before it was released.

To confirm my thoughts about the lack of proper testing, I did encounter a number of graphics "glitches" during the time that the game was working. The game would also occasionally freeze up between levels during the full motion video. While my system did crash a few times when this happened, usually things would go back to normal after ten to fifteen seconds.

Certain parts of Galaga's gameplay are extremely frustrating. For example, I’ve found that some of the Galagan ships can take full advantage of the 3D playfield by looping around behind your ship only to return and smash into your fighter. Of course, you are unable to even see the enemy ship heading toward you.

One of the gameplay changes that have spoiled the game for me involves "missions." Along the way, you have to perform certain tasks to advance in the game. During the second level, for example, you have to pick up a number of pods floating in space. If you complete all of the stages in the level, and you haven’t picked up a certain number of pods, you have to start the whole level all over again. ?!%&$@* Since when has Galaga been about missions, or rescuing objects floating around in space? Galaga is about blasting wave after wave of enemy ships. Adding this extra nonsense tells me that the developers don’t have a clue about the original game, or what made the game great in the first place.

Despite the fact that the "top down" mode of the game is faithful to the original coin-op game, the side scrolling mode and the third person mode just don’t "work" for me. Entirely too many of the fun aspects of the original game have been changed by adding these additional views. The result is that the game just doesn’t "feel" like Galaga.

For example, the third-person mode is just plain horrible from a visual & gameplay perspective. Your ship is entirely too large, and it covers up too much space on the screen. To make matters worse, there is this distracting jet engine vapor trail coming out of the back of your ship. The problems with your ship make it difficult to see what is going on in front of you. The developers apparently tried to compensate for this by adding a target receptacle to help aim your laser cannon. More often than not, your ship is in blocking the view of the target receptacle, so you still can’t see where you are shooting.

If the Galagans capture one of your ships in the third-person mode, you might as well kiss your fighter goodbye. Since it is so hard to see what you are shooting at, more often than not you will end up firing at your own ship.

These third-person perspective problems could have been fixed in several ways. The size of your fighter could have been reduced, which would have made more visible space on the playfield. Your ship could be semi-transparent, which would allow you to see through the image of your fighter. Or perhaps the third-person view would work better as a first-person view, which would give you a completely unobstructed view of the action.

"There have been a lack of good arcade-style "shooter" games on the PC, and I was hopeful that Galaga: Destination Earth would help fill the void. Frankly, it didn’t even come close."

Something else that really bothered me about the third person mode of the game is that is just too much moving around on the screen at once. Enemy ships often appear from the fog in front of you. (Fog in space?) Since you can’t see too far off in the distance because of the fog, and the enemy ships appear so quickly, you will probably be caught off guard quite a bit. It is hard enough to watch what is going on because your ship is blocking your view most of the time. Add to that the constant zig-zag movement of thirty enemy ships, and you will end up with crossed eyes and a severe headache.

There is also no two-player support in this game. This game screams for some kind of cooperative multiplayer mode, and it has been left out completely. There is a very brief mention in the manual about playing Galaga: Destination Earth online. However, when I visited the URL listed in the manual, nothing was available.

I also don’t understand the user interface. The game manual states that I can navigate the menu structure with my game controller. However, my Microsoft Sidewinder joypad does not work with the menus at all. I have to use the joypad to play the game, and pull out the keyboard to navigate around the menus. I’ve gone through all of the setup steps to configure the Sidewinder (both in the game and in Windows) and it still refuses to work with the game menus.

Sound in the game was appropriate, but nothing spectacular. I would have liked to heard more use of sound from the original coin-op. I was disappointed that sounds like the Galagan tractor beam and the laser fire sound weren’t sampled from the coin-op.

The in-game music was interesting, but it could have been much better. The opening theme for the game is a symphonic-style remix of the theme from the coin-op, which was very good. Once the game starts, the music switches to the "techno" style music that is completely overused in today’s computer games. I would have liked it better had the in-game music sounded more like the symphonic style of music used at the main menu.

Here is something else that blew my mind. At the end of each stage, you cannot move your ship for a few seconds while the camera angle changes. During this time, if your ship runs into an object floating in space, like ship debris or an asteroid, you take damage to your shields! You are completely powerless to prevent this from happening.

This brings me to my biggest beef with the game: THERE IS NO SAVE GAME FEATURE. That’s right, there is NO way to save a game at all. If you only have 20 minutes to play a game, and you want to stop and come back later, you can’t save your progress. If you are at a particularly tough portion of the game, and you keep getting killed, there is no way to start a new game that picks up where you left off. I hate to have to say this, but the lack of a "save" feature in this game is completely stupid. Why on earth did King of the Jungle develop a shooter of this type WITHOUT a save game feature? It is just plain ludicrous and stupid. If I work my way up to level six, and get killed, I want to restore my saved game and start over from where my game was saved – not from the beginning of the freakin’ game. ARRRGGHH!!

I assume that this was done to keep the game near it’s coin-op game roots. In my opinion, it was a dumb move for King of the Jungle & Hasbro Interactive to not implement some kind of save game feature.

Finally, an emulated version of the coin-op classic should have been included in the game, along with some history. There is no "classic" mode of the game, and the history consists of a short single paragraph at the end of the manual.

Galaga: Destination Earth is a complete failure of a game. This is mainly because the developers didn’t stick with the formula that made the original game such a success. The addition of different 3D visual modes, and all of the gameplay changes have altered the game to the point where it does not resemble the original game from 1981. Had King of the Jungle & Hasbro Interactive based the game entirely around the pseudo-3D top-down mode of the game, and added some extra weapons, the game probably would have been enjoyable.

Instead, the game we have is a 3D mess that is full of inexcusable stupid bugs. I’ve played bad games before, but I have never played a game with the quantity of bugs that are present in Galaga: Destination Earth. Why didn’t the game play properly out of the box? Why doesn’t my controller work for navigating the menus? Why have I encountered graphics glitches? Why does the game occasionally freeze, or crash for no apparent reason?

When the game does work, Galaga looks & feels like a really bad rip-off of the StarFox games on the Nintendo consoles. I am still completely befuddled as to why there is no save game feature. It just makes no sense.

Here is the scary part: I received a "beta" of this game from Hasbro Interactive several months before the game was released. I found that the "beta" was more stable than the game that you buy off the shelf. The "beta" also included a "training simulator" that featured you ship flying around a computer generated environment that looked like something out Disney’s Tron movie from 1982. Unfortunately, the trainer didn’t make it into the final game.

I’m really upset that this game turned out as bad as it did. I really wanted to like this game, but in the end, all it did was test my patience. Hasbro Interactive’s other releases for 2000 (Breakout, Frogger 2, and Pac-Man) have all managed to capture the feel and flavor of the original games, so why is this game such a dud?

There have been a lack of good arcade-style "shooter" games on the PC, and I was hopeful that Galaga: Destination Earth would help fill the void. Frankly, it didn’t even come close. It is entirely possible that the hard-core Galaga fans will appreciate portions of the game. I would be willing to bet, though, that even they will be completely frustrated & fed up with the game after a few short gaming sessions.

For another look at Galaga -- Destination Earth,
visit my friends at ClassicGaming.com