Galaxian was released in 1979 and as such is the oldest game in this collection. It's clearly inspired by Taito's Space Invaders released the previous year. You control a spaceship left and right along the bottom of the screen shooting at aliens in formation who also move to the left and right across the top of the screen. It's identical to Space Invaders, except for being in color. Namco couldn't have that, as they didn't want a copyright infringement lawsuit. So the bug like enemies can break from formation and swoop down moving left as right and firing as they fall. It's essentially never-ending wave after wave of enemies. It's all for the high score. The game spawned five sequels from Namco. It was originally published in stand up and cocktail varieties by Midway in the United States. Personally, I always preferred Space Invaders to Galaxian. I still do all these years later.
Rally-X was released in 1980. It was also published in the United States by Midway. This is essentially Pac-Man re-envisioned. You control a rally car around a maze while trying to collect all the flags in the level and avoiding the other racer cars and rock obstacles. The course is a maze. You aren't as walled in as Pac-Man. There are some open areas. The controls work identically to Pac-Man, just the joystick. Up, Down, Left, and Right. You pick your direction. You can't crash into the maze walls unless you hold the direction into them. There are four other cars to avoid. You just avoid the enemies, collect the flags, before the fuel runs out and move on to the next level. It's quite fun as a Pac-Man alternative.
Pac-Man was released by Namco in 1980 and was published by Midway in the United States. They published it in both stand up and cocktail varieties. Everyone knows Pac-Man. Taito's Space Invaders and Atari's Asteroids were hits, Pac-Man was the first video game smash hit. You control Pac-Man in a maze with four ghosts. You're collecting pellets for ten points each. The ghosts are fatal and must be avoided at all costs. In each maze are four power pellets, when eaten the ghosts become vulnerable for a while, and flee. If you can chain the ghosts together while they're vulnerable, you'll gain far more points, and more points mean extra men, which means the further you can potentially go. Pac-Man is a perfect game. The gameplay is as fun today as it ever was. It's one of those titles you can pick up anytime to kill twenty minutes with while waiting to leave or something along those lines.
Bosconian was published by Midway in the United States in 1981. In it, you control a ship in an eight way scrolling shooter. The unique thing about this one, is you fire both forward and backwards at the same time. The object of the game is to fly around the play field and destroy all the mother ships that have six destructible sections all the while avoiding asteroids and swarming enemies defending the mother ships. It can get chaotic, even by the era's standards. Firing both forwards and backwards while being able to fly in eight directions with swarming groups of enemies coming at you from all directions results in truly twitch game play. It's actually great fun. The game features synthesized voice yelling "Alert! Alert!" and "Spy ship sighted!" and "Condition red!" and various other things. It's clearly an inspiration for Williams' Sinistar which would be released the following year.
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