Galaga '88

This game was a sequel to the popular Galaga game. It had similar gameplay, but incorporated new "cute" sprites for the game, with some new features: triple ship, choice of starting mode, warps and other tricks discovered through gameplay. The game also supports a continue feature.

The game plays much like the original, but at the beginning you have a choice of heading out with a single or dual ship (choosing dual means having one less ship as a spare). In either case, enemies fly into their formation and you can attack them as they enter. Some waves will have escorts that can be destroyed and some have extra enemies that will fly at you instead of heading into formation.

There are other new types of enemies that will appear, based on where you are. In addition to escorts, loopers, divers, and (of course) the Galagas, you may encounter balloon-like enemies, puffers that burst into numerous smaller versions of themselves, enemies with shot-proof armor, and more. The loopers are still able to mutate into small enemy formations while the divers can now merge two-to-one and create giant versions of themselves.

The Galagas will attempt to capture your ships as before, and this time they can capture duals! If you free the dual, all three ships combine to create a super fighter that shoots three big shots at a time.

You lose ships as you are hit by enemies. Triples will become duals, duals become singles, and singles just blow up. You can also lose singles and duals to the Galagas, and to free them you must destroy the captor Galaga during its attack flight, otherwise the captured ship(s) will be destroyed.

In later stages, obstacles will block your shots at enemies. Destroying them releases warp capsules that can be used to eventually warp your ship to newer, tougher dimensions.

In stage three and during every fourth space stage after that (do not count the ice planet stages), you enter the Galactic Dancin' Challenge Stage. Like in the original, you attempt to shoot waves of enemies (including a number of Galagas) that fly in a variety of tricky formations that make them hard to hit. After each Challenge Stage, if you had collected two Warp Capsules earlier, they will be used to blow a dimensional rift to let you into a tougher dimension.

If you do not touch any controls in the levels where the enemies dance, then you get a 10000 point Mystery Bonus.

Though obstacles provide warp capsules, the other way to get them is to destroy big enemies formed from two smaller ones. As there are no obstacles in the first leg of the game, this is the only way to warp after the first Challenge Stage.

Collecting blue capsules not only gives you power needed to warp, but you also become briefly invincible.

In certain stages, starting at about Stage 15, the last enemy will try to get away. Get it before it does, and it may drop a red capsule. Collecting this capsule instantly transforms whatever ship you have into a triple ship.

The copyrights on the US cabinet indicate that the game was manufactured by Atari Games and that Namco has the copyright for engineering and design.

The game's hardware is a Namco System 1 board. It uses a three 6809 processors, a 63701 MCU, and many custom ICs. For sound it uses a Namco 8 channel stereo wavedata PSG, a YM3012 DAC, and a YM2151 FM sound chip.