Insert Coin: Galaga

“Galaga is a fixed shooter arcade game developed and published by Namco in Japan and published by Midway in North America in 1981. It is the sequel to Galaxian, released in 1979. The gameplay of Galaga puts the player in control of a space ship which is situated on the bottom of the screen. At the beginning of each stage, the area is empty, but over time, enemy aliens fly in formation, and once all of the enemies arrive on screen, they will come down at the player's ship in formations of one or more and may either shoot it or collide with it. During the entire stage, the player may fire upon the enemies, and once all enemies are vanquished, the player moves onto the next stage.”

You know what’s missing from kids these days? The arcade. There was nothing not the feeling you got when you would park your ass in front of a machine for hours and be surrounded by a bunch of strangers that cheered your every move on. I think they call them “Orgies” nowadays, but back when I was a kid arcades were where you went to play games like Galaga. You were a single ship that had to fight literally hundreds of alien ships.

"Don't worry. I got this."

I remember there would be times where I would get into the zone. I would ignore everyone around me and just sit at this game and start whipping all kinds of ass. The game would trick you by starting off all easy. The enemy aliens line up in a row. They don’t even all fire at the same time. They just float there and get destroyed by one shot. If this is all it took to save the universe then you were all set!

"This is easier than handicap parking!"

 Finally some of them will grow a pair and decide to attack you at the same time. Meaning they would line up like the cast of Bring It On and charge at you. And what I mean by charge at you is they would fly close to you, do a cute little spin, and then fly back to the group of chickenshit aliens that didn’t move. Sometimes one of them would linger and you’d pick his sad ass off.

"Come on, guys. You're not even trying."

I know I’m making this game sound easy but it really wasn’t. This shit got harder than a street turd after a few levels. They started sending bastards that flew fast. Suicide bombers. And the infamous tracktor beam alien. The cool thing about this jerk was that if you hit it properly you could have two ships at once. Yes, that’s right. Two. At. Once.

Menage a Violence!

Sending one ship to fight a fleet of aliens doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. I mean, obviously there’s more than one as evidenced by the fact that you can Voltron your asses together and make two. Why not three together? Or call me crazy, four at the same time? I have this game on PS2 and I still cant beat it.