AGA (ISA Graphics Card)

Synopsis

Galaga's objective is to score as many points as possible by destroying insect-like enemies. The player controls a starfighter that can move left and right across the bottom of the playing field. Enemies swarm in groups in a formation near the top of the screen, then begin flying towards the player, firing bombs at the fighter. The game ends when the player's last fighter is lost, either by colliding with an enemy or one of their bullets, or by being captured.
Galaga introduces a number of new features compared to its predecessor, Galaxian. Among these are the ability to fire more than one bullet at a time, a countdown of the player's "success/fail rate" at the end of the game, and a bonus "Challenging Stage" that occurs every few levels, in which a series of enemies fly on and off the screen in set patterns without shooting at the player's ship or trying to crash into it. These stages award a big point bonus if the player manages to destroy all enemies.
Another new addition to Galaga's gameplay is the ability for enemies to capture the player's fighter. While the player controls a single fighter, a "Galaga boss" (which takes two shots to kill) periodically attempts to capture the fighter using a tractor beam. If successful, the fighter joins the enemy formation. If the player has more lives left, the game restarts with a new fighter. The captured fighter flies away with the enemy that captured it, shooting at the player like normal enemies, and can be shot down and destroyed. The player can free the fighter by destroying the Galaga boss in flight, which causes the captured fighter to bond with the player's current fighter, doubling its firepower but also making a target twice as large.
Galaga has an exploitable bug that can prevent attackers from firing bullets at the player, due to a coding error. Additionally, similar to the infamous "split-screen bug" in Pac-Man, a bug exists in Galaga in which the game "drops" from level 255 to level 0. Depending on the machine's difficulty setting, this can cause the game to freeze, requiring the machine to be reset or restarted in order to start a new game.

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