Michael Kimball

An emotional chronicle of classic aracde game fandom.

Boss Fight Books #4

Galaga

This is an amazing, uncommited gathering of facts around Galaga, the best shmup game ever made. Filled with well known and also many unknown facts, it’ll certainly appeal to the ones wanting to travel down the videogame and arcade memory lanes…

Daniel Santos

Ken Gagne

Galaga is divided into 255 paragraphs that have little to no relation to each other. Maybe if every third paragraph were collected, there would be a narrative here, but instead, the author tries to maintain three concurrent but separate threads, jumping between them at a whim. It's lazy writing that makes no connections and no transitions, aimed at someone whose attention can't be kept longer than a paragraph.

The worst part was the times Kimball would dedicate a paragraph to an interesting fact about Galaga, then three pages later, devote another paragraph to confessing he made it all up. I've never seen an author hate his readers so much as to compulsorily lie to them. The third time this happened in 45 pages, I quit.

I've received all four Boss Fight Books via Kickstarter to date, have read three of them, and have found two of them intolerable. I've never been so disappointed to have backed a campaign.

Galaga Boss Fight Books #4

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