Zogging Hell!!!

Winning a prize for the most ridiculous title for a Jaguar game (just pipping Attack of the Mutant Penguins), Crescent Galaxy is a horizontal shoot'em-up. 'Yawn' I hear you say, 'what's the gimmick?' er well Crescent Galaxy has super true colour graphics. Tragically that's about it. This was one of the games (along with Raiden) intended to be released with Atari's abortive 'Panther' console. Upon ending the project Atari decided to port the game to the Jaguar. Crescent Galaxy would have been a nice game on a sixteen bit machine such as the Panther, and would have been a great graphical showpiece. Unfortunately the Jag's 2D capabilities are considerably better than this. The enemies are reasonably good, and the backgrounds look nice, but they seem to lack any sense of depth. ST Format said that playing this game was like flying your ship against a wall paper background. Sadly they were right. Your ship itself is poorly defined and pixelly. Sound is also extremely lack lustre. A tinny poorly defined and weak techno tune starts with the title screen, but don't expect any more music while your playing. A few weedy sound effects try to make up for it but fail miserably.
As a blaster in it's own right it's not that bad, but it offers little new to old classics like R-Type and Menace. If this was the only game the Jag had to offer, I'd get my coat.

Zogging Hell Rating: 5/10

Cheats

High Score Bug: Get a score of several million and finish the game. An easy way of doing that is to activate the cheats, halt the background at a bunker and 'park' your ship on the bunker to receive tons of power-ups and points. When you get a score of several million, and finish the game the number 029 will appear (inexplicably?) in the top left corner of the title screen.

Activate Cheats: (at title screen): 1,1,9,3 (No confirmation) (11/93 = "Trevor's Birthday")

Commands (use controller #2 during game play):

A = Speed up foreground scrolling
B = Slow down foreground scrolling
C = Fire special weapon without depleting inventory
1 = Power up gun
2 = Cycle through bomb power-ups
3 = Mark other moons as completed
4 = Toggle ship invincibility
0 = Cycle through sound effects
* = Play selected sound effect
L/R = Background scrolling speed
Option = Skip to next stage