A review by gengelcox
Galaga by Michael Kimball

informative medium-paced

4.0

Unlike the previous three books in the Boss Fight series, I had played this game. Not as much as the author, but it was one of the arcade games that I could be somewhat decent at, much better than I was at its contemporary, Defender. Galaga was an update to Space Invaders, where the aliens swooped in to the screen from the sides and bottom rather than simply appearing at the top. You could zap them with your fighter as they did so, and part of the game was memorizing where they would enter so you could position your fighter in the best spot to clear them. The other innovation in Galaga was the ability to get double fighters—but only if you let the aliens capture your fighter. Woe to the player who lets their fighter get captured without having an extra in reserve!

I likely never got as good as Michael Kimball at Galaga because I wasn’t willing to put the time into memorizing the entry patterns, something players often did with these arcade games that were programmed to always be the same if you always did the same. I have a good memory, but rather than patterns, I preferred to fill it with lines from the plays I performed in or music trivia. I played arcade games because they helped me escape, for a quarter at a time, my troubles. I suppose it was better than drinking my troubles away, which is another use I could have put my quarters to. As Kimball describes, it was the same for him, but his troubles were magnitudes worse than mine, and perhaps that’s what fueled his ability to get the high scores on Galaga and other machines.

This book is ripe with nostalgia for a certain time period when the arcade (at the mall or a freestanding shop) was king, roughly the early 80s. Before Atari, Mattel, Nintendo, and Playstation came along and we all started playing games on our TV screens. I occasionally miss the arcade, with each machine dedicated to just one game, especially those with unique controls, like the double joystick mechanism of Crazy Climber or the trackball of Marble Madness. I’m in Japan at the moment and, like previous visits, I always take the time to look into one of the arcades here to see machines that don’t make it to the US: lots of rhythm games, from the Taito drum to one that has ten pads around a circular screen to one that looks as if you’re playing the piano. They have their shoot-‘em-ups, too, but the ones that really intrigue me are the fantasy wargames that use a combination of playing cards with RFID chips in them and a touchpen. I would love to try these games, but my Japanese is not enough for the complexity involved. In Denver, I took my nephew out to a retro arcade: you pay an entry fee and can play all those old 80s machines until you tire or the place closes. It’s not the same, but then, I have very few things troubling me these days.