“Okay. Can I still be Garth?”

There are games that I rented through the years that were really not that memorable.  For some reason, even though I didn’t have fun with it at all, Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum still manages to bring back memories of a pretty fun day in our little neighborhood.

 

1990 - NES

1990 – NES

 

In reflecting on this game’s lanky visuals and awkward controls, I thought for sure it was an LJN title.

It’s quite baffling that even with the best source material – X-Men, Nightmare on Elm Street, Back to the Future, The Karate Kid, Jaws, among many others – a company could still manage to consistently make games that were genuinely difficult to have fun with.

It seemed like LJN always found a way to screw it all up…

Dash Galaxy was actually a Data East title, however.  Having released classics like BurgerTime and BreakThru in the 80’s, they struggled to compete with other smaller publishers like Taito and Sunsoft.  They managed to break thru with a few other hits (see what I did there?), but with the exception of Caveman Ninja – also known as Joe & Mac – there weren’t enough quality titles to save Data East from bankruptcy in the early 2000’s.

 

This has been on my wishlist for a while, but I can't find it anywhere...  even online. Sad face.  :(

This has been on my wishlist for a while, but I can’t find it anywhere… even online.
Sad face. 🙁

 

Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum seems to be a love letter to the early batch of sci-fi movies and TV shows.  The game’s box art, title screen and short introduction scene are reminiscent of something you’d see in Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, or even The Jetsons.

Not a bad concept, but it didn’t translate into anything all that fun to play.

The game suffers from a bit of an identity crisis as it tries to be two things all at once.  On one hand, you have the top-down, block-pushing puzzle element, which serves as a way to travel from one level to the next.  Once you get into the levels themselves, you control Dash in a side-scrolling environment to collect items you can use on the puzzle side to progress further into the game.

There isn’t much shooting going on, so it’s no Mega Man or Contra by any stretch of the imagination.  Instead of killing enemies, you’re relegated to avoiding them as much as possible, although touching them and losing precious oxygen is sometimes unavoidable.

The controls aren’t great, but they might not be so bad if the enemies didn’t have such unforgiving patterns.  As you’ll see in the video below, there are times that the player has to stop bouncing on a platform, wait a moment, then start the process all over again just to collect a star.  It’s a tedious part of the game that happens way more than it should.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that graphics don’t necessarily make or break a game…  but these are really quite bland, aren’t they?  There’s no character on the screen that looks interesting enough at any given time to make me care about any of them.

The morning after renting it at the Co-op, I went down to the basement and played it for a few minutes.  To put it mildly, I wasn’t impressed.

I didn’t get to rent something every weekend, so I had to pick my game of choice carefully on our trips to the video store.  Whenever I got home to something I didn’t enjoy, it was quite a bummer.  It’d have to wait until my mom was feeling generous enough to rent another game for me.

#firstworldproblemforan80skid

 

 

On that Saturday morning after dejectedly turning off my NES, I didn’t let the wasted rental opportunity get me down.  It was a sunny and warm day outside, so my friend Michael and I went around the block on our bikes.

We’d always look for trails in wooded areas, park next to a small brook and look for tadpoles, that sort of thing.  This time around, we may or may not have broken the law…  I can’t be sure of this, but I do know we bypassed a locked gate that had a sign on it.  What the sign said, I can’t remember, but it was probably “No Trespassing”.

It wasn’t a long bike ride, or anything, but it was fantastic to see a side of our neighborhood that we had never seen before.  Thanks to the joy of MS Paint, I’ve highlighted the bike trails we took that day.

This goes without saying, but that ended up being way more fun than staying in and playing Dash Galaxy would have been.

 

Good times.

Good times.

 

I know this wasn’t much of a post, but I also wanted to say that I’m working on a pretty cool project with my good friend Jordan.  We’re still in the process of crossing our T’s and dotting our…………….  lower-cased J’s………..   and I’m greatly looking forward to sharing more news about that in my next few posts!

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