GALAGA
Galaga is an awesome game. If you've never played Galaga you're missing out. I don't know what cave and/or 3rd world country you come from, but Galaga is one of the pre-eminent games of my arcade spent youth. I can recall seeing bigger, older kids playing Galaga in the stand up arcade version where I would have to jump to see the screen because I was so short. Then I discovered the sit down two player version and I was hooked.
Galaga was released by Namco in 1981, and is classified as a fixed shooter arcade game. What this means is that you navigate a little space ship back and forth across the bottom of the screen (side to side only) while firing at moving target alien thingies. The aliens look vaguely insect-like, and they move in formation above the ship, with the occasional swoop down towards you to drop a bomb. I remember once at my grandparents' house I was in the back yard and a giant bumble bee buzzed right at me, and I thought of Galaga. Those little buggers (in the game) can be pretty tricky, and they kamikaze into you all the time. Sometimes the enemies in the top row will dive with one or two escorts.
Galaga also has a “bonus round” where the aliens swoop by you very quickly in formations and you have to shoot as many as possible before they zip off the screen. At the end of the bonus round your number of hits is tallied against your total shots fired, and a bonus score is added to your overall game score at that point.
From time to time one of the aliens will swoop down and then turn around abruptly, pause and shoot out a little tractor beam. This becomes an important strategic move on your part if you have enough ships in reserve (lives, essentially), because you can go and get caught, at which point the alien swoops back up to the top of the screen with your ship behind it. If you don't have another ship and you get caught in the tractor beam it's game over. It's not all bad though, because if you have a remaining ship you then have the chance to kill the alien and then have TWO ships working in tandem, shooting at the same time. Oh yeah! This doubles your killing power (literally) and makes the bonus rounds actually possible to complete without wearing a blister into your index finger. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Relation to Galaxian
Most people don't know that Galaga is a sequel to an
earlier game, Galaxian. Maybe this is because Galaxian was
a small release, or because it came out before arcades were
a big deal (1979), I dunno. But, if you look at Galaxian
and you look at Galaga you can see the similarities.
First of all, Galaxian has a horde of attacking alien
armies that exchange shots with the player (this is also
similar to the grand daddy of all space-alien type games,
Space Invaders) like Galaga. Galaxian also has (in contrast
to Space Invaders) the aliens periodically making
kamikaze-like dives at your ship. Speaking of ships, they
resemble each other in both games, and the star field in
the background is pretty much the same, too.
Galaxian is different from Galaga in that boss Galagas
(green-and-yellow aliens that replace the Galaxian
Flagship) take two hits to destroy. The boss Galagas also
occasionally stop in mid-dive and attempt to capture your
ship with their tractor beams (see above), this is not seen
in Galaxian. In addition, Galaxian lacks the bonus stage
that Galaga has.