At the arcade, my father gravitated toward the pinball games and would station himself among a group of about three games that he would periodically rotate between. In any case, I always knew where to find him. And I would return back to base when I ran out of coins.
He usually handed me about two dollars. I think that there were times when he would get a little pissed off if I came back too many times asking for more coins. This was because not only was I costing him more money, i was distracting and interrupting him from his game. So in order to prevent myself from having to return to him empty handed, I learned to focus on only the games I was good at.
I would run game on SF2, beating large crowds of people. But if there were someone else playing SF2 or even a few people playing who were better than me, then I’d defer to the tedious task of swatting space bugs in Galaga. Between these two games, I was capable of handling my business on nights at the arcade.
ABOUT GALAGA
The first time I exceeded a million in Galaga was in 1997 at Cutler’s Records on a Sunday. I had just finished a shift at Claire’s Cornercopia and the Shubert had a show that afternoon, so everyone and their parents and their grandparents were out and about, looking for an order of the acclaimed risotto. It was a busy shift, and I was done by 4, with two hours to spare before the Record Store closed. So I drifted over there, still heightened by the fast paced demanding environment I had just departed from.
Galaga is a game set in patterns which increases in speed only at three points in the game. The first two rounds are slow, and it then picks up immediately. That speed only noticeably increases at one other time in the game. These speed increase can be customized within the programming of the game, so that if you go to one arcade, your ship may move faster or slower, the extra ships would be set at higher or lower intervals. That sort of thing.
Generally, one plays video games for points, and Galaga is a game which rewards those who can handle the grind of repeating the exact same tactics, round after round, with room for several different types of variation depending on the patterns of the game, which rotate within a pattern of their own.
The grind of the game is as follows. Galaga often gets mistaken for Space Invaders, and it’s actually really similar but with a few more nuisances. The ships don’t immediately appear in the block that approaches you. And rather than get closer to your ship, the enemies (bugs, as we may call them) fly at you in various patterns. The blue ones do a loop at the bottom of the screen. The red ones bomb dive towards you. They both shoot projectiles which will end your turn, as well as contact with them as they loop scroll and reappear at the top after they’ve made their pass at you.
As the ships appear on the screen, Once they arrive in their set location, they move from side to side in a patternistic glide.
And there were way more points from completing each bonus round, which cycled between five variations, each differing in patterns and characters. You get extra ships for surpassing certain points milestone, and there does come a point where no amount of extra points is going to win you any more free ships. La