Long time no see...I was browsing around a Japanese shopping proxy (as you do) and on a whim searched up Galaxian 3 items, ended up coming across this lovely book. It's got a short story in it as well as concept art and probably more goodies I haven't seen yet. Needless to say I've got 2 copies of this arriving, one is gonna be debinded and scanned in because I think this needs to be shared with folks.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/stores/page/7B58AB77-8F00-482D-AB22-DC294E0C0AC6?ingress=0&visitId=f299b51e-26ca-4c7f-b252-e5a3a7771815&ref_=as_li_ss_tl

Just opened recently, the "Namco Legendary" store...they have shirts for both games in a variety of colors as well as many other UGSF titles including the canceled New Space Order and Starblade Operation Blue Planet  Amazon Japan ships worldwide too, so presumably once these are in stock you'll be able to buy them, just keep in mind Japan has different shirt sizes and I think you have to go up a size for it to be US/etc.

I noticed that different options in the game seem to unlock over either multiple plays or just making it really far, not sure which but it seems more the former. Got past the Cannon Seed/Red Eye type section and the red commander guy came out but I got hit by a stray laser on my last shield...

I think the POD system used for Star Wars is also the one they use for the Gundam POD games, which are way cool. I'm betting they used Starblade as a test bed for that system after it got canceled.

Nice! Never seen the Japanese flyer before, the one on the Arcade Flyer Archive is the US one which has a kitschy B-movie cover 

It looks like they used sprite scaling for it instead of the polygon + LD combo Galaxian 3 uses.

This is just a sort of PSA, but ever since Youtube introduced its "Red" subscription service last year several Japanese companies did not get on board with it and as a result of their terms certain videos containing music licensed by those companies are blocked in the US. Unfortunately this also includes several Namco titles, because Victor Entertainment produced the soundtrack CDs for them, and as a result videos of the Galaxian 3 Laserdisc on Youtube are blocked as well.  

The only way to get around this as far as I can tell is using a proxy or VPN service and selecting a European server (or Japanese) because Victor has only blocked the videos in the US. I think it might be possible for the video owners to dispute the copyright too since the blocking is done by a bot, but it seems like Retro Reality (one of the users that uploaded the Galaxian 3 LD along with a few other Namco LDs) has been unable to get it working.

Should also mention this only affects uploads of the game soundtracks and the LD and not stuff like recordings of the game (like the ones of GH-28 and GT-6). It seems like emulator footage is subject to it because a few folks I know have had to be careful when uploading videos of certain Namco arcade titles due to Victor's bot algorithm coming across it and blocking it due to the fact that they simply released the soundtrack on CD at one point...quite preposterous.