Giga Wing

Last night I had the opportunity to play Giga Wing. It’s one of those games where you take a very-destructible flying machine and move inexorably forward to deal with hundreds upon hundreds of enemy ships. Pretty standard stuff, really. But, pretty quickly, two things really stand out about this game.

First, the enemies somehow shoot lots and lots of instantly-fatal bullets, so many that the screen is often completely full of Hot Flaming Death(tm). But to mitigate that, you can charge up and occasionally use a ‘reflector’ shield that will bounce the bullets back in the general direction of the enemies, and will turn into collectibles.

The collectibles are the second thing to note. Each time you get one of the gold-colored collectible junkets, your ‘bonus multiplier’ goes up, which increases the rate that your score goes up (natch). The thing is, though, that there are so many items that increase your multiplier so fast that your score is going to get up to a ridiculous level really fast. My first time playing it, I had scored over 2,100,000,000 points. And Wikipedia says that the all-time high score at this game is 291,252,468,839,040 points, which I think I could buy.

Given enough credits at this game, it’s not too tough to get to the end. The game’s actually kind of short. But you need to memorize most of this game and have extremely-finely-honed reflexes to beat it with any kind of panache. Which you’ll certainly need to have if you want to fight the ‘real last boss’ see the ‘real ending’. It turns out that to do both of those things you have to finish the game with one credit. One! I think I have a better chance spontaneously becoming fluent in Esperanto.

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