A truly fantastic game few gamers know about. Play it, and you're in for a real treat. Sublime stuff.
In the game's initial title sequence, a witch flies onto the screen and crashes into a butterfly - and that's when you wonder what on earth (or off earth) this game might be about. Actually, I'm still not entirely sure what the witch meant, but your ship is in fact a butterfly.
The game has a top-down perspective that scrolls smoothly as you fly through the onslaught of meteors, missiles and monsters with bizarre, eye-boggling vectors which will eventually be the cause of their demise once you figure them out. The level of difficulty is just right, and the simple controls and concept are easy to pick up. When "game over" does crop up, you are never frustrated, just hungry to try it again. After playing it through several times, you become more familiar with the patterns, speed and movements of your various enemies and can develop an ideal strategy for defeating each of them as quickly and efficiently as possible, and this I found delightfully intellectually engaging. The boss battles, too, each demand some thinking before they can be conquered. No willy-nilly shooting-and-swooping- fluked-my-way-to-the-next-level happens here. These bosses are intelligent.
As the B button is the main button for shooting, there is a healthy dose of good ol' button mashing, and the d-pad controls respond well when you need to move evasively. The sound effects are highly satisfying and complement the actions and events perfectly. Also impressive are the multiple simultaneous sound effects, something of a novelty on the NES, and the range of sound effects is stunningly diverse. The weaponry is at the heart of my enjoyment of this game. There is no shortage of enemies here, and fairly, no shortage of interesting weapons. Killing enemies occasionally rewards you with a capsule. When swallowed, these colour-coded pills deliver arsenal delight, from basic missiles to swirly crystals to green sonic waves, and when you consume multiple pills of the same kind, their intensity multiplies, e.g. eating several missile pills consecutively results in a stunning spray of missiles in multiple directions, and multiple sonic wave pills mean they radiate at a broader, deadlier scope. It's pretty satisfying. However, achieving a multiple-pill level weaponry is difficult as one hit and your weaponry dwindles a level, until eventually you are back at your basic lasers, but because it is you your pills that cop the hit, they indirectly supply a life by saving your butt. Interestingly, what i found exciting about the pills was their colour-coding, indicating what special weapons they might endow you with. Sometimes you have a split second to decide if you might sacrifice your current flashy weapon for one more effective for the situation, taking into consideration how some enemies move in a way designed for certain shots.
Rarely along the way, a butterfly i.e. a life, might appear up for grabs - just don't lose sight of yourself and the threats around you staring at the prize! My favourite weapon, for it's originality and the sheer level of attachment I felt to it, guarding like my baby alter ego, would have to be the miniature sub-ship I fondly call "the hat". you can pick it up at special points in the game (if you're lucky). It shoots when you do, acting as a little helper, but because it stays hovering in the place on screen where you first activated it, only following you from screen to screen, you must keep your eyes on both yourself and it to keep it alive and protect it because it's really rather sad when it does die on you. Or you have the option of putting it on top of your ship, like a hat, so you fire with double-power, or rather unflatteringly, you may attach it to your behind so you can shoot in both directions. If you are indeed lucky enough to maintain it all the way to the boss, it can really help get those few extra shots in that may make all the difference.
The music is enjoyable and enhances the experience very well, and sounds suitable spacey and threatening while somehow also keeping you in a good mood with its upbeat tempo.
The graphics suffice and are about as flashy as the NES can serve up, and for me that is very tasty eye-candy, but essentially "Galactic Crusader" is gameplay over graphics, and i really wouldn't prefer it any other way.
This game is very very addictive - playable for hours straight and so immersive that you lose track of time and never want to stop, which is exactly what you want in a mindless shoot-'em-up.
You also have the good option of two-player mode, not cooperative, which I would personally love to see, but certainly taking turns battling it out for the highest score, which is fun for my friends and myself as we've become pros, adds a healthy facet of replay value.
All in all this is a delightfully well-rounded game, truly a hidden gem, but when you play it...oh...such fun!