Retro spotlight: Geometry Wars: Galaxies

The Wii and DS got their own Geometry Wars entries back in 2007, which to this day remain the only Nintendo system releases in the franchise.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I can’t pinpoint exactly where the retro boom started, but I can tell you that the Geometry Wars franchise certainly didn’t hurt it. The original Geometry Wars was just a bonus game tucked away inside of the Xbox’s Project Gotham Racing 2, but Retro Evolved released on Xbox Live Arcade, and it was a huge hit for the platform and an example of the kinds of smaller games and concepts that a digital storefront could utilize. It might sound weird to consider now, given the ubiquitous nature of indie games and digital downloads and such, but back in 2005, none of this was a proven success on consoles yet. Games like Retro Evolved were an excellent proof of concept that showed there was a market out there for digital-only, comparatively bite-sized experiences.

Which is not to say that the Geometry Wars concept couldn’t also scale up, because it did, and with wonderful results. Geometry Wars: Galaxies released on both the Nintendo Wii and DS systems in 2007, with the difference between the two mostly coming down to visuals and potential control schemes. Regardless of which version you played, Galaxies was great, and worked as an expansion of the smaller idea that was Retro Evolved into something much larger.

Geometry Wars is a twin-stick shooter where your goal is survival, and racking up as many points as you can while doing so. You can fire in all directions with one thumb and move in all directions with the other. There are a limited number of screen-clearing bombs for when you’re cornered or overwhelmed and need to compose yourself, and enemies drop collectable items upon defeat that add to your score multiplier. When you die, so does your multiplier, and in the earlier versions of Geometry Wars, your game would actually end, too. It was more of a “how long can you live?” game at that point. Galaxies worked differently, however.

In Galaxies, some levels kept that same setup, and might have even stripped you of the use of bombs, but generally speaking you had a few lives to live, and could earn more through reaching certain point thresholds. This did not make the game easier, however: now, instead of just trying to score as many points as you can and trying again, the designs of the levels could be much different, and harder, too. Now, there were thresholds for bronze, silver, and gold medals to be awarded upon the completion of a stage, and the number and variety of enemies could increase, too. In addition, the stage was no longer just a rectangular arena that was slightly larger than your television screen. Now, these arenas could come in all shapes and sizes, with obstacles to hinder your free movement, with little nooks and crannies for enemy ships to hide in while avoiding your shots, with things designed in such a way that your movements needed to be very exact and very precise if you were to survive a sudden influx of enemies in a tight corridor.

I still go back to Galaxies after all this time and the continuation of the Geometry Wars series on more powerful platforms because it struck a wonderful balance between expanding the concept of the franchise, and keeping things simple. Yes, it’s a lot bigger than Retro Evolved, to the point that the Xbox Live Arcade game is just tucked away within Galaxies as something you can do if you feel like it, but it maintains the simple elegance of that game by sticking to what worked best while figuring out how to iterate on that. If you are not feeling a constantly building tension within you as you survive longer and longer in any Geometry Wars stage, as your score continues to grow and grow and the sheer volume of enemy ships and the complexity of their attacks on you increases, then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a feeling as natural to me as breathing, and it remains the draw for me to this day.

Despite the fact that part of what makes Geometry Wars great is how impressive the modernized graphical flourishes are within what initially looks like a pretty Spartan, 80s-inspired twin stick background — the colors, the brightness, how everything pops and swirls, it’s truly lovely — the DS version of the game is my favorite to go back to. It lacks all the aforementioned flourishes to the degree they’re able to work on the Xbox 360, Playstation 4, and even the Wii, but it makes up for that in white-knuckle intensity. You can hold the DS a lot closer to your face than you can your television, and it allows for a kind of hyperfocus state where you can shut out everything around you and focus your whole mind on keeping moving, keeping shooting, keeping alive.

The DS version of Galaxies had to be played with a directional pad and face buttons, or with a stylus on the touch screen, and I still believe the trade off was worth it to be able to focus like that. It’s a little easier to justify this point nowadays when you can play your Galaxies DS cartridge on the 3DS, the circle pad of which is absolutely perfect for precision movement in this game, but still. I put in a ridiculous number of hours back in the Geometry Wars D-Pad Days, too.

The dual-screen look of Galaxies DS. Image credit: Nintendo Life

That it was so pick-up-and-play in the DS mode helped, too. Stages could go on basically forever if you kept alive, sure, but in order to make an attempt at a gold medal… well, if you had 10 minutes, you could give it a shot or two, depending on the stage. Headphones in, DS out, sitting on a subway car and blanking out on everything around me to focus in on Geometry Wars. Ah, memories.

The Wii version had its own unique control scheme you could utilize, with the IR pointer of the Wii Remote utilized to control where your ship would shoot, while the analog stick on the Nunchuk attachment moved the ship itself. Like with the stylus setup, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this scheme, especially if you acclimate yourself to it, but considering I just wrote about how I prefer to play the DS version over everything else in spite of its comparative inadequacies because of how it lets me focus, you can imagine how much I would rather just plug in a Classic Controller and utilize its twin sticks for the twin stick game than try to wrap my brain around another form of moving and shooting.

There are 10 different solar systems for you to play in Galaxies, and each has their own varying number of planets, with each planet being a level with its own level design and medals. You are not alone while you play, technically, as you can pick a drone to follow you, and the drones have various abilities. There is an attack drone that fires in the same direction as you, and a defensive drone that fires in the opposite direction to keep enemy ships from sneaking up on you while you’re focused elsewhere. One drone does a sweep around your ship firing at whatever it comes near in the process, another collects Geoms — those multiplier-enhancing collectibles enemies drop, and also the in-game currency for progression and access to new worlds and systems — and yet another attempts to lure enemy ships away from you by leaving your side and acting as a decoy. You level them up so they become more effective, stronger, whatever by using them, so as you improve through the experience of playing Galaxies, your drones improve with experience points.

The score thresholds vary not so much because of your progression through the game and to more difficult challenges and levels, but due to whatever the goal is. Some stages have pretty low thresholds for gold in a vacuum, but that’s because they’re going to make you get there the hard way: maybe there are fewer enemies coming at you at once, but they are more dangerous ones, making it tougher to build and maintain your multiplier, or maybe you only have the one ship and no bombs nor extra lives to be earned.

The very last system in the game, though, has both extreme difficulty and extremely high scoring thresholds for you to clear: you have to be very devoted to the idea of Geometry Wars to even unlock it, or, at the least, have a friend who owns the other copy of the game. The Wii and DS are able to locally connect to each other, and if you choose Connectivity on the game’s main menu when the other version of the game is doing the same in the same room, you can unlock this final system, Lambda. This unlockable still works, too, since the process isn’t predicated on the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, but just a local connection between systems, and you can even manage the same connection with a Wii U and 3DS in place of the systems this function was originally designed for.

Just for reference in terms of the difficulty jump we’re talking about here: the first level in the game lets you net a gold at 3 million points, while the final level of Lambda doesn’t even let you earn a bronze until you’ve hit 80 million points. The gold for that stage? A cool 1 billion points. Good luck with that.

The only real downside to Galaxies at this point is that the online leaderboards are no longer active, given this released nearly 15 years ago now, but there is plenty of individual challenge and success to be had even if you can’t check your work against others. Sure, it’s not up to snuff visually with Retro Evolved 2 or Geometry Wars 3, and that’s certainly a downer, but as already pointed out, visuals are not the sole reason to be playing these games. They’re intense, challenging experiences, and the specific design in this version of the game remains my favorite, even as more attractive bells and whistles have been added to the series in a number of ways since. Unlike a number of games from a few generations ago that I write about here, too, you can get either copy of Galaxies pretty cheap. The DS version goes for around $5-20 on the secondhand market, depending on whether it has a box or manual or is just the cartridge, and the Wii version is right around the same, to the point that I just saw a sealed copy for all of $15 on Ebay while checking in on this.

Despite my obsessive love for shmups, I’m pretty picky about twin stick shooters: something about them has to really work to grab me. Geometry Wars, though, has been a favorite of mine since I first got my hands on it in the mid-aughts, and the release of Galaxies only further intensified those feelings. Easy enough to play, but requiring hours and hours and hours to fully master all of its intricacies and challenges, Galaxies is still as much fun 14 years later as it was when it first blew me away. And since the copies I have now are not the originals I first purchased, well, I’ve got plenty of unlocking and re-mastering left to do.

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