Spiders from Mars
Growing up in the 80’s, I spent many an hour in the arcade closest to whatever store my mom was driving us to. She would shop while my brother and I would drop quarters way too fast, and would eventually need to beg her for more money. Never learned to pace myself, and I also never got good enough that a dollar would last more than 10-15 minutes. This was mostly due to games like Defender and Galaga, which were way too hard for an 11 year-old to master.
You remember Galaga, right? A riff on the classic Space Invaders, but instead of just marching across the screen, these aliens swooped right down at your ship and shot missiles. It’s been tried on a touchscreen in the past, with little success. The issue is the control scheme which requires a fire button as well as other buttons for special abilities. Buttons and touchscreens do not mix well. Galactic Nemesis from CS54 simplifies the control scheme and, in the process, has created a fantastic Galaga clone for your iDevice.
The controls are simple: touch the screen. Your ship will follow the same route as your finger, allowing you to actually see your ship instead of obscuring it under your sausage-like digit. As for the problem of having a button to fire your weapons, they just removed it. No button. Your ship just fires in a never-ending stream while your finger rests on the screen. There are small buttons to the side for special weapons or shields, but those are used infrequently enough that it doesn’t cause a problem. You have several ships that you unlock and upgrade along the way, and each level has different challenges for you to aim for to unlock more coins to upgrade or buy new ships.
The aliens are diverse enough that you’ll learn to hate them in short order (I’m looking at you, blue spiders), and the graphics and sound are straight out of 1981.
I know that Galactic Nemesis isn’t the kind of game we usually post about here at Pocket Tactics, but I’ll be damned if I can’t stop playing this thing. It’s taken over all of my “couple minutes to kill” moments on my iPhone, and it plays even better on the iPad. You can pick it up for iOS Universal for $2.
And now, the corniest and most cringe-inducing trailer in video game history. After the break, of course.
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