ARCADE GAME SERIES: GALAGA - High Score Strategy 

If you're not swearing you're not playing GALAGA - LMAO! Thanks for the tips.

To turn this game over which I've only managed to do just once you really have to be in the zone. You are not even thinking but acting on instinct this takes years of playing to do. I've sank so many quarrters into galaga I could have a new car right now

I share your disdain for the red harbingers of death. One of them ran off with my old lady during my second tour in Nam'. Never saw it coming. Cute kids though, despite the whole inter-species thing.

I held the national high school for 6 months in 1983 according to the arcade magazine. The local arcade operator sent my info to them. We also made a deal not to play on Friday or Saturday night. 3,255,870 - 2 hours 50 mins - 42 extra ships - stage 178.

This was a rather entertaining video tbh, I'll try that strategy after I make this comment, but I watched the entire thing, and i was laughing the entire way, thanks for the video/tips!

My boy, you need to come to the St Louis Science Center and check the gaming exhibit and play some Galaga...its free and its on the actual arcade machine! >:)

Galaga was my game back in the 80’s! Let me start by saying that it would take me 40 minutes per million points, and I’d often draw a crowd when I was in my groove. My highest game was just under 4 million, and I’ll explain my strategy. Note that I’m only talking about the full console version of Galaga. It was never about focusing on shooting bugs while they’re flying vs at rest, or any other particular order. Just clear stages as fast and efficient as possible, mostly while the bugs are descending to line up. Staying out of the corners, always moving, always controlling your shots, getting all perfect challenging stages, and ALWAYS ALWAYS using a double ship are the keys to this game. You’ve got to get that double ship ASAP! That’s the only way to get anywhere in Galaga. When I say control your shots, I mean try not to miss. You can only have few (4?) shots (single or double shots) on the screen at a time. If you’ve fired all of your shots, you won’t be able to shoot again either till those shots hit something or they go off the screen. Making your shots count as much as possible will allow you to clear levels faster. Every challenging stage has key positions where you can sit to easily and perfectly shoot all of the bugs and earn that perfect score. The key is to figure out those ideal spots. Every challenging stage can be perfected, so keep working at it to figure them out. Since the game stops giving extra ships after hitting a million points (at least the original full console version), my goal was to not lose any ships till I hit that first million. If I lost a single ship before a million, I’d abort the game and start over. Even if I was at 600,000, I’d start over if I lost a ship. As I recall, you can only earn a total of 40 extra ships, so you need to make them last as long as possible after that first million. When you really get going with a double ship, and the bugs are flying at their fastest speeds, the stages absolutely fly by. It always gave me a head rush! There are some other interesting things to note about Galaga. You can actually disarm the bugs for the entire game. If memory serves, you’d shoot all of the bugs in stage-2 except for the upper left most blue bug. Then you wouldn’t shoot at all while it passed by something like 20 times. Then, you’d shoot it, and the bugs would be disarmed for the rest of the game. Don’t quote me on those steps, but it’s something like that. I only disarmed the bugs a couple times because it was boring. I had to play at full tilt or not at all. Another interesting bit of trivia is that when you have lots of extra ships, those extra ships only display half way across the screen. The rest of the extras are in memory. The same is true for level-badges-they only go to half way across the screen. Also, when you have so many ships and level-badges, they will actually overlap a little in the middle. I have one last interesting bit that comes to mind. Only player-2 on the full or seated console displays the millionth digit, so I would always play second player even if it meant putting in 2 quarters to only kill off the first player. Player one’s millionth digit just goes off the screen to the left. I hope this helps those of you looking to improve your game.

Just got me a high score first try using this strat, never really focused on point farming all that much aside from the bonus stages. I was trying to beat u but u ended up getting 5k more points lol.

If you let one of the bees alone on stage one for about 15 minutes in the beginning, it will tweek the game,. The bad guys not shoot only fly.

Used to play this years ago . There was a cheat. If you left 2 aliens left , and dodged them for a length of time they would eventually stop firing middles at you . For the rest of the game none of them will fire at you for the rest of the game. Is anyone else aware of this?

stayed for the score! 😁 Congrats!

This is the Galaga video we all deserve! Came for tips, stayed for entertainment.

Fantastic video. I was on the edge of my seat hoping you’d get your high score and I think you’ve hilariously articulated the emotions of everyone in the universe who has ever played Galaga. I just want to live too!!! lol.

Some guy at my local arcade has 390000. I really want to beat him.

Loved it, had me swettin' , nice!

Well, you asked, so... 10. It is silly to waste time worrying about getting 1600 per big ship and leaving the red ships. So you come out of the 2nd stage with 15000 instead of 10000; who cares? After 2nd stage, it's all about just killing everybody as they come on the screen. Trust. 11. With one ship, you can stay in the middle for the 1st challenge stage, most of the 2nd, none of the 3rd, none of the 4th and all of the 5th. With 2 ships, you can just stay in the middle for the 1st, 2nd. and 5th. 12. The timing of your button presses is key. You can only shoot 2 shots on the screen at once. If ships are closer or moving faster, you have to fire more quickly. 13. As ships come in, wait to shoot your first shot and make sure you don't miss the ship. 14. Play one more time.

They get real aggressive after a while.

Awesome! I just got the arcade 1 up Galaga. You must have the real thing. The 1 up version has a glitch in its audio and sometimes makes a “popping” noise ; u can especially hear it when your shipped gets caught and they play that music. Thanks for the tip! I think I’ll try now on my 1 up!

Can I just say I laughed my ASS off this entire video. Thank you.

I'm glad to see someone better than me, in this case really good at a game actually record a good video! So many reviews or look-backs have someone who can make reasonably good videos but can't play worth shit! I never made a challenge stage past the second, I think. I wonder how many there are until they repeat? Talking while playing is not a good idea. You may as well just play well, then go back and record dialog over it. My cousin's son didn't want to play video games, but just watch others play video games on RU-vid. I asked if he wanted to see games I played as a kid. "No," he said. Then I saw someone (Fluffy?) talk about confronting his kid who just wanted to watch people play video games because they were "experts." So I guess that's a thing and my cousin isn't retarded!

Haha dope

Came looking for brass and found gold. I gotta agree that if you're not swearing you're not playing Galaga. Great game man! I am the menace at work who will max the score and leave it. It gets restarted almost weekly now. Lol

*[TAKING NOTES INTENSIFIES]*

Best advice I can give for getting farther - when it starts getting harder, focus on clearing out either left or right half of screen. Enemies on the left side of formation come down and go right, and vice versa. So if you clear out the right half of the formation, you can dodge to the right much more safely, and head back left to shoot more when you feel it's safe. Keeping reds alive isn't a bad idea to score some extra points in the earlier levels, but if you're really trying to get as high a score as possible, I think clearing the levels ASAP is a better strategy, for most part - you get the higher point value if you shoot them while flying in anyway, and if you're fast enough, you can have most if not all of the screen clear. Just make sure to leave two+ boss galagas at top of screen, because they'll never do the tractor beam if there's only one in formation. lol

“Your scorpion hands... claws they call them... who the fuck cares” 😂😂😂

I think you'd find you get more points faster just going through the stages. ;)

I've got to beat my boss in this game; guess I got what I needed (evil laugh)!

Thanks for tip and it wasn't boring I felt your enthusiasm.

You Sir are hilarious! I enjoyed the pottymouth commentary very much and the score tips...I will enjoy eviscerating my enemies at my upcoming competition! My gaming group record is only 65,000ish! TY and I am clicking that red button but fuck those red bugs!-

Thanks for this video. My dad loved Galaga as a kid so naturally I thought I would give it a try. My high before this video was around 142k, which brought it up to like 193k. Thanks!

I bought a Nintendo from Amazon really cheap and it had this game preloaded. I went to two youtube videos for tips, one was yours and another with this guy who scored over one million points. The Galaga that came with the Nintendo was far more harder than both of yours. I tried the techniques from both and we only got to level 8. I think we got the version that rip off quarters from customers. My friends also watched and they was saying that you guys might have the baby version. Try the Nintendo version much harder.

I still have my Galaga on NES. I remember my high level was 27.

Thank you, I few days ago I order a new ps4 and this will be one of my first games to buy. Thank you

I loved this video 😂 Great Tips & premo swears. My hands are sadly much older now - but this is still hella fun. Cheers!.

Double your points by shooting the galagas while in flight.

Funny as helllll 😂😂

2dudes1ship

I enjoyed that ! Thank you.

I made it up to stage 40

that was great lol !!

So why exactly do you kill the blues first?

Ooh you had me on the edge of my seat.

Gg

Thanks for the great video and tips! Which hardware were you using in this video?

weak

Left the video because of the horrible commentary..

Did you hear about rudy ferretti and his ex girlfriend and him. He thinks he's the best gamer in the world but to me rudy ferretti was a fake gamer and Atari age didnt want nothing to do with him and Brett Weiss said rudy was a weird guy and a neighbor that lived across from where the murder happened she said rudy would hit on other girls in the appartment building and he would run around with a gun hanging out of his pocket. And I saw the RU-vid video where he was holding a gun and now that he's gone 4ever and I feel sad for amy molter and they said amy was a good person and many people are not surprised that rudy killed amy and plus he had a history of beating his girlfriends on a daily basis. And you just interview a woman beater and murder and does that make you feel.