Review: Galactix

[Flack]

After the disappointment of Space Commanders II I decided to revisit one of my favorite retro vertical shmups of all time: Galactix.

Galactix is a typical space shoot 'em up. The ship you control is at the bottom of the screen and the alien craft you'll be shooting at will be at the top.

Your ship is controlled with your computer's mouse. Left and right move your ship accordingly. The left button fires your primary weapon. The right button launches missiles. The third button launches a robotic arm which is used to grab and reel in bonus items (additional missiles, bombs, energy blocks, and additional weapons). These are represented by letters: "M" for missiles, "B" for bombs, etc. Letters appear after some ships are destroyed, and they are constantly floating up, away, and eventually off the screen. You'll have to hurry to catch them.

Galactix contains 100 levels that run in waves of five. On level one you'll face aliens who fire slow bombs. On level two you'll face a second wave of aliens that fire faster lasers. Level three contains enemies that fire even faster heat-seeking bullets. Level four contains a few of each of these enemies. Level five also contains a few of each of these enemies, along with a boss ship. When a boss ship is destroyed, an additional letter ("S") will appear. If you can grab the "S", your ship will be upgraded. There are three upgrades in all -- a faster laser gun, followed by two additional laser guns, followed by even more laser guns. With no upgrades at all it'll take ten or so hits with your measly bullets to destroy an alien. Fully upgraded, your onslaught of laser rain will destroy an entire wave of ships in seconds. Take too much damage though and your upgrades will disappear, leaving you to fend for yourself with wimpy shots until you can destroy another boss ship and restart the upgrading process.

50 levels into the game you'll reach an intermission where all of your bombs and missiles will be removed. The next 50 levels are similar but with more (and more heavily armored) aliens. The five-cycle levels continue here, although no new upgrades are available.

On level 100 after defeating the final boss you'll fly to Earth and attend an awards ceremony. Not the most earth shattering ending to a game I've ever seen, but it's there. Reaching the end is not difficult as the game offers infinite continues, although you'll always restart with no weapon upgrades.

Galactix is particular about the speed of your computer. I remember being much better at this game than my friends were, only to discover that it ran much more slowly on my 386 than their 486's. I played through and beat this game last night using DosBox and I can tell you that on my laptop through DosBox, the game runs more slowly that it appears in this video. There are multiple versions of Galactix available across the web and I read that there may be a Windows native version, so I may try and track it down.

When I read that the new PS4 and Xbox 720 may only be available on dual-layer 50 gig blu-rays, it reminds me how much fun some of these old games were. Galactix 1.3 will fit on a single floppy disk. Twice.

[youtube][/youtube]

[AArdvark]

Although it's never really shown, do you think this is the game the game that the kids were playing in "Don't Copy That Floppy"?

I could see this being easily addicting.


THE
MORE WAVES
AARDVARK

[Flack]

One thing I forgot to mention is that there are several versions of this game floating around -- 1.0 through 1.5, all for DOS. Another version was later released for Windows. There are slight changes in between each version. Version 1.3 (the version I grew up playing) includes the infinite continues. By version 1.5 they had slightly updated the graphics, sped the game up, changed the graphics on the sides of the screen, and added many more sound effects. At some point along the way they added a new intro of a news broadcast being interrupted by the aliens. You can see it at the beginning of this video.

[youtube][/youtube]

[Flack]

Although it's never really shown, do you think this is the game the game that the kids were playing in "Don't Copy That Floppy"?

I could see this being easily addicting.


THE
MORE WAVES
AARDVARK

It's possible. I copied this floppy a lot back in the day. You can also play it without a mouse, which was a plus as the school computers back then didn't have one.

[Tdarcos]

Galactix is particular about the speed of your computer. I remember being much better at this game than my friends were, only to discover that it ran much more slowly on my 386 than their 486's. I played through and beat this game last night using DosBox and I can tell you that on my laptop through DosBox, the game runs more slowly that it appears in this video.

I would think so. In case you're not familiar, DosBox is an emulator (unlike the way the Windows runtime workalike for Linux WINE isn't). What we're looking at in the YouTube video is on bare metal; a software emulation of the machine, which is what DosBox is, it's going to be several orders of magnitude slower.

It might be interesting to see if someone could use a multicore system to speed up DosBox for games.

It might be confusing because people hearing of DosBox might be thinking of the Dos Compatibility Box - sometimes called the Chernobyl box - from some older operating system - I think it was OS/2 - which was a method of running some software but was not an emulator the way DosBox is.

[Flack]

What we're looking at in the YouTube video is on bare metal; a software emulation of the machine, which is what DosBox is, it's going to be several orders of magnitude slower.

From the Youtube comments:

Uploaded on Jan 29, 2011
Galactix intro and gameplay, played and recorded with DOSBox.

[AArdvark]

I remember a turbo switch on the front of my first PC. Needed to slow down games like this and Netwars, ( which, by the way is what I'm hoping is reviewed next)
At first I was rather puzzled as to why the switch was there at all. The switch was always on, why would anyone want to slow down a machine? Now, older and wiser, I know the answer.



THE
WISE OLD
AARDVARK