[AC] Galaga '88 - ALL Clear 806,300 (Dimension 3)

Clear of the game without using continues.

Played for La Calice Cup Winter.

Unlike the name implies, Galaga '88 came out in arcades in 1987 and was made by Namco.
Galaga '88 is the fourth game in the Galaxian series and the sequel to the original Galaga. It has highly improved graphics, more enemy variety and a bunch of extra mechanics as well as bosses and different routes.

Galaga is one of the oldest shmup series ever made. It was still very reminiscent of Space Invaders in that levels were single screens, you can only move left and right at the bottom of the screen and you'd take out enemy waves that come in certain formations.
Galaga was a bit different in that enemies would also fly down at you in different patterns.
The original Galaga was endless, but this game has an actual start and ending.

You can only have two shots on screen at a time. So accuracy is really important in this game, as missing your shot will make you a sitting duck for a second or two.

Key to beating this game is powering up your ship.
To do this you have to let yourself be captured by certain enemies that deploy tractor beams. Your ship will be captured and you'll lose a life. However if you destroy the enemy that captured your last ship, you'll be able to merge with your last ship and form a Duel ship. You can also repeat this process to get a Triple ship. Getting hit sets you back one step.
The bigger your ship, the more shots you can shoot, but it also increases your hitbox by a lot. Triple ship also has much bigger sized bullets, which makes shooting enemies easier.

At the start of the game you have a choice of starting with a Single or a Duel ship. This has no effect besides picking the starting ship and I'm not sure why you'd ever pick Single.

The game is divided in single screen stages, bonus stages and stages that has actual screen scrolling and bosses! Truly innovative.

After every so few stages you get the Galactic Dancing bonus stage. In these stages enemies can't kill you and the challenge is to destroy all the enemies before they leave the screen. You get a big bonus if you can accomplish this.
There is also a secret bonus during these bonus stages that involves not moving or shooting at all. This gives a lot of score but not as much as the bonus for killing all the enemies normally.

There are two different item drops:
- Blue pods lets you warp to the next dimension after Galactic Dancing. You need to collect at least two to warp. Drops are fixed afaik. Picking it up gives some i-frames.
- Pink pods power you up to the Triple ship instantly. There are only two in the game, in stage 25 and 15. The pink pod gets dropped by the last enemy in the stage if you kill it while it's descending.

The game is divided into five different dimensions. The higher the dimension, the harder the game will become. You can go up a dimension, but you can't go down.

Most of the score in this game comes from going to dimension 5 asap and clearing. Dimension warps are worth a ton and the final boss on dimension 5 gives you 400k. A basic clear of dimension 5 is worth like 1,3 million for example.
Besides that you also get a lot of score from letting enemies join together or letting them split up when they are descending. Basically you only get score from enemies when they are descending.
And of course getting all the enemies in the Galactic Dancing stages.

For survival you want to speedkill everything asap. Get most of them while they're swooping in and take care of the dangerous enemies first. Autofire helps a lot for speedkilling during the swooping in.
You definitely want to kill the enemies that come from the bubbles before they pop open, as they shoot dangerous 3-way shots.
Bosses always move away from you, so stay on one side of them and slowly move towards them to speedkill them.

Where enemies come from when they swoop in is static but it's different for every stage. Optimally you want to memo each line but it's quite hard to memorize because literally everything looks the same. For optimal play you might just have to stick like ten post-it notes across your screen where every direction is written down per stage or something.

Starting from dimension 4, the game will introduce shield guys that will block all your shots until they descend down. This is a significant difficultly jump, so I just opted to go for dimension 3.

I would have liked the game a lot more if you'd just get Triple ship for the whole game. The shot limit and the tiny hitboxes on your shots is really frustrating. With Dual an enemy can still slip through the middle of your two shots and that feels really bad.

This run had some really clutch recoveries. Recovery in this game is really hard, so I'm quite surprised I managed to get through. Game is absolutely brutal.

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