Moon Cresta

Moon Cresta
North American arcade flyer by Nihon Bussan (left) and US arcade flyer by Gremlin Industries (right). The illustration of Nichibutsu's Moon Cresta was also used for Moon Quaser's arcade flyer.
Developer(s)	Nichibutsu
Publisher(s)	Nichibutsu, Taito, Sega-Gremlin, Centuri, HAMSTER Corporation
Designer(s)	Shigeki Fujiwara
Platform(s)	Arcade (original) ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, Dragon 32, Sharp X68000, SNES, PS2, Virtual Console, PS4
Release	May 1980
Genre(s)	Fixed shooter
Mode(s)	Two players alternating turns
Cabinet	Upright, Cocktail
Arcade system	Namco Galaxian Sega Z80
CPU	Z80 (@ 3.072 MHz)
Sound	Tone generator and discrete circuits
Display	Raster, 224x256 pixels (Vertical), 98 on-screen colors

Moon Cresta (ムーンクレスタ^?) is an arcade game released in 1980 by Nichibutsu. A moving starfield gives the impression of vertical scrolling, but the game is a fixed shooter in the vein of Namco's Galaxian.

Incentive Software published a version of this arcade game for many 8-bit home computers of the time. Dempa also released a port of both Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta for the X68000. It was also released on the Wii Virtual Console in Japan on March 9, 2010 and PlayStation 4(Arcade Archives) in 2014.

The player begins the game with a small spaceship armed with a single laser cannon. After successfully completing the first four waves of alien attacks, the player must attempt to dock his ship with the next 'stage' of the ship. This second stage has two lasers in addition to the original one. (Each docked stage is one of the player's "lives". This concept of docking two "lives" together to increase firepower would later reappear in Galaga.)

After successfully clearing two more waves of aliens, the player must again dock with the third and final piece of the ship which also has two more lasers (giving the player 5 lasers in total). The trade-off for this is that the entire ship is a much larger target. Failure to correctly align the stages during either docking sequence causes the destruction of the stage being docked with.

After completing the first eight waves the player's ship reverts to the first stage and the process is repeated. If any of the player's three ships are lost along the way, the docking sequence occurs only after the first four waves have been completed.