Date Released: February 1990
Date Played: 10 November 2021
Dash Galaxy is notorious for being an absolutely terrible game. Time and time again I've seen it on lists of the Top 10 worst NES games and is often mentioned with disdain. Having a bit of a penchant for playing terrible games, I was actually a little excited to try it out. The truth is that I've never actually met anyone who has played this game in real life and hoped that maybe all of the hubbub on the internet is more of a meme than reality.
You play as Dash Galaxy, who is a throwback to the campy sci-fi movies of yesteryear. Right from the onset the artwork and title screen give you really strong Flash Gordon vibes... and I think that's a good thing for a video game. A little flavor can carry a game a long way and help it overcome some of its faults. After pressing start you're given a short cut scene of Dash entering a towering rocket ship which I guess is the alien asylum mentioned in the game's title. It looks pretty decent and sets up the game for something that never actually happens. It makes me think that the developers chose "Alien Asylum" for the title because it sounded a lot cooler than Dash Galaxy and the Too Talk Rocket.
Once the game starts, you're not greeted by a high action side scrolling stage. Instead, you're in an overhead view that is nothing more than a block pushing puzzler. You have to slide these blocks out of the way in methodical fashion to avoid blocking yourself in order to gain access to the rooms scattered around the 25 floors of the asylum. There are several rooms on each floor and in addition to moving blocks out of the way to reach them you'll also have to disable laser traps and unlock doors to gain access. When you enter one of these rooms the game turns into a side scrolling collectathon that looks pretty terrible even for an NES game. Dash is oddly proportioned and the color pallet is very muted and everything feels dull and flat. There's very little texture to the sprites and they look more primitive than they should. Once inside, the door shuts behind you and you have to collect all of the blue switches in the area to reopen it. In addition to that, you are searching for keys, bombs, oxygen tanks, and other items to help you along your way. Finding these other items are essential to progressing in the game and missing one of them can spell disaster. You can easily find yourself in a position where you can't continue because you failed to find... or wasted one of the bombs. Dash's health is represented by his oxygen level that continually depletes as you play thus giving the game an timer that helps to ramp up the stress level to an uncomfortable level. Scattered around these rooms are the enemies and obstacles that range from bats, robots, flamethrowers, slides, and other hazards to impede your progress. The enemies usually just slowly roam back and forth and the slides usually only cause you to lose a few seconds of progress and serve more as an annoyance than a real challenge to overcome. Coming into contact with these objects will cause Dash's oxygen to deplete extremely rapidly and before long, you'll die. Instead of killing the enemies, or dodging attacks, you'll usually just stand by and wait for them to slowly pass you at a snail's pace as you watch your oxygen deplete anyway. Also scattered around the levels are trampolines that you have to repeatedly bounce on over and over to build increasing height to get the hard to reach items or to land on a tall platform. These trampolines are a huge component of the game and you'll spend a large amount of time doing basically nothing while you character bounces up and down while slowly gaining height and as roaming bats slowly fly into you and use up all of you oxygen while you're unable to do anything about it. It's very annoying, and can suck your spirit to play the game after repeated occurrences. All of this is frustrating, but isn't anything out of the ordinary for a game of this time. At this point, the game feels like many other mediocre platformer of the day; unpolished and clunky, but playable. Unfortunately, nothing is as it seems... and you'll realize from the very first step you take in one of these platforming sections that something is very, very off.
Dash Galaxy has some of the most awkward, floaty, and counterintuitive controls I have ever seen in a game. When you press the D-pad to move, Dash slowly begins to walk in that direction and after a few steps he will all of a sudden start running at a breakneck pace (I guess that's where he got the name Dash). It's extremely jarring and it feels like his speed increases by about 300% after a few steps. Much of the platforming of the game involves timing this speed increase to awkwardly hop over gaps in the floor, from platform to platform, to reach a trampoline, or to avoid an enemy. You'll find yourself constantly careening towards the edge of a pit only to stop right at the edge almost as often as you find yourself accidentally crashing into an enemy, falling of a platform, or missing your target. It feels like you never really get the hang of it. You'll find yourself constantly trying to tap the D-pad to inch up to what you think is the perfect place to make your leap of faith or backtracking to get more of a running start. You're never really sure if you picked the right spot to start your run and you have to just pray that your instincts are right. To make matters worse, when you are dashing the height of your jump becomes basically nonexistent and you can only jump to platforms that are on the same level or lower than your current ones. Once again, it feels like you never get used to how this feels and you'll be terrified that you're going to fail every jump that you make this way. When you're not dashing, holding the jump button causes you to soar almost straight up into the air. As you slowly fall back down, you'll have to carefully maneuver your character to hit your mark. There's some strange mechanic where you can't really jump as you're walking and will often have to come to a dead stop, jump, then press forward to clear the gap. It, much like the dashing mechanic, is difficult to describe without feeling it yourself. The best way I can word this is that the game feels clunky... and slippery at the same time and I don't recall ever being quite this uneasy having to control my character in a game before. Also, as you walk towards the edge of the screen, your character doesn't stay centered and you'll often find yourself positioned over to one side of the screen and unable to see what's coming up ahead of you. This will often lead to you not knowing where you're supposed to jump, where items are, or if there's an enemy directly in your path. This is a common occurrence in a lot of subpar NES games so it's not really a surprise to find it here as well. But having this flaw piled on top of the myriad of other issues only serves to put another nail in the coffin of this disaster of a game. Even after you begin to get a hang of how the game controls you'll encounter many enemies that stand right in your way and you have no choice but to take damage. When you add the oxygen timer and the ultra repetitive and tense music, Dash Galaxy becomes a recipe for a rage quit. Still, even with all of these issues, I was fine just plugging along at the game for a while and thought that it was pretty bad, but not as terrible as everyone would have you believe.
After clearing all of the platforming sections of the first floor, I jumped on the elevator and moved on to the second one. Then, the 3rd, and so forth. I slowly began to realize that most of these platforming rooms that were giving me fits didn't have any bombs, keys, or other useful items in them and were basically just a waste of time. At first, I thought it was strange that the game is making you clear all of these rooms for no reason before you could progress. Then, around the 5th floor I decided to only clear one room before getting on the elevator to ascend to the next floor. And guess what? It worked. I was shocked at this as I realized all of the time I had wasted doing these useless and frustrating rooms. Realizing that you don't have to do every single room in the game, I decided to not clear any of the rooms on the 6th floor just hopped right back on the elevator... and it worked again. So, you don't have to clear ANY rooms?!? What is going on with this game? Apparently, you can climb up the asylum without doing any of the rooms. So, I decided to start clearing a few rooms here and there and worked my way all the way up to floor 10. It wasn't very fun, but it was doable. Almost half way to the top of the asylum... maybe I can beat this game on my first go.
I tried to hop on the elevator on the 10th floor and it didn't work. I cleared all of the rooms and still couldn't get on the elevator. Classic... just like an NES game to put you in a position where you end up not knowing where to go or what to do. It's a tale as old as time and something I've experienced over and over again since I was 5 years old. Back when I was a kid, I would grab a Nintendo Power to help me out, but these days I decided look at an online walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong. After watching for a few minutes, I was appalled to learn that you're apparently supposed to find question mark items in certain rooms on specific floors to open warp points to let you skip several levels ahead in asylum. This is totally fine for a secret or a speed run. But it turns out that finding these warps is actually REQUIRED TO PROGRESS. If you don't find the warps, the game just soft locks you on certain floors and won't let you go any further. It also doesn't even have the common courtesy to tell you outright that you've failed. There are no clues in the game or and indicators to know where the warps are without trial and error... and to make matters worse, you have to find EVERY SINGLE ONE of these warps in order to beat the game. Since the game has no passwords and no save system learning where these warps are located would take a huge amount of time. I can't even imagine the amount of work it would take to slowly learn where these warp points are located. I'm not going to do it.. so I decided to watch someone who did.
As it turns out, once you know what rooms to enter, what items to collect, and where all of the warps are you can beat the game in 10 minutes! What a colossal waste of time. This essentially means this is a 10 minute long game that is padded out with dozens of hours of filler, dead ends, and distractions. It's not like Super Mario Bros. where you can warp to the end and finish the game very quickly because the levels you skip over do have merit if you decide you want to play them. In Dash Galaxy, none of the rooms have any merit and the developers not only want, but REQUIRE, you to skip over the content they've made. They must have known they had a real stinker on their hands.
Where does that leave us, gamers? It leaves us with a game that is nothing more than an exercise in trial and error. If you're going to build a game around a mechanic like this, you better make the experience fun and addictive. Obviously, the developers failed immensely in this task and created an amalgam of bad decisions. This game doesn't even fall into the, "so bad it's good" category and deserves all of the ridicule it has received over the decades. The only positives that I can say about this game is that it is an actual game and it does function.
Final Status: Played (for a few miserable hours)
Final Score: 3/10 (Terrible)
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