Namco Museum

"Five Namco games that you can play on your GBA/NDS"

Namco Museum for GBA is a retro compilation package consisting of five games that at some point had either been originally released as arcade games or on a first-generation Nintendo system. The five games in this package are Ms. Pac-man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Pole Position, and Galaxian. Of those five games, Galaga (9/10) is really the only one that has any real meat on its bones. This continual vertically scrolling space combat sim, presented in a third-person overhead viewpoint, will likely last for at least 10 minutes, at least if one wants to sit down in front of their GBA-playing device and play a game for that amount of time. The game's sound is quite interesting, especially during those parts where the enemy ships move forwards toward you and backwards.

Pole Position (6/10) is a racing game in which you must drive your vehicle around a race track for the longest time possible before the timer expires without crashing into any of the other cars on the road or signs, as you doing so will cause you to explode. Although a lives count for this game is nonexistent and although you automatically reappear in the spot where you blew up each time, it is not something that you want to have happen, as it will slow you down signficantly and increase your chances of not being able to finish a race in time. Like many other games that had been available in the arcades at some point in video game history, the game's visuals are impressive. The cars do not contain much in the way of detail, but the explosions are well-done. Certainly, a darker blue sky and darker shade of green on the grass would not have hurt, but as they are, they get the job done. With the exeception of the explosions that occur each time you crash into something (or vice versa) and a voice that tells you to "prepare to qualify" and lets you know whether or not you have qualifed for the race, there really is not much sound of which to speak in Pole Position. The only real sound effect is that of your vehicle on the road as it is driving around the track. Out of the five games, Pole Position was the only that had not been released on a first-generation Nintendo system, which may not necessarily be a bad thing considering that many aspects of it leave one or more things to be desired, such as more tracks, wider tracks, and an actual chance to actually get into the game before wanting to play a similar game which enables you to do that, something like Enduro.

Like Galaga, Galaxian (7/10) is a continual vertically scrolling space combat sim presented in a third-person overhead view, except unlike that title, the game had never been released on the NES in the United States, only the Famicom in Japan. In this game, you play as a spaceship that must protect itself from enemies coming from the top of the screen. You do not have much opportunity for scoring a large number of points in this game, as destroying each enemy fighter only yields ten points and you can only shoot one bullet at a time, as opposed to three or six. Additionally, shooting your enemy fighters is somewhat slow, which limits your ability to amass large scoring ranks even further. The sound is quite good and loud, especially when the enemy fighters are approaching you. This causes them to make a really loud noise, which closely resembles that of a police siren or fire truck.

Ms. Pac-man (8/10) is a game in which you play as a character shapped like a giant yellow dot with eyes and a mouth which must go around a series of mazes collecting pellets without being touched by a collection of ghost characters that infest each maze. As you progress through each maze, the enemies become progressively faster which therefore makes the game progressively more challenging. At the assistance of your character are four power pellets that you can eat and will help your character by turning the ghost characters a blue color, which will make them unable to harm you. It only works for a short period of time. Although there seems to a decent amount of opportunity for scoring in Ms. Pac-man, which will vary with the level of skill unique to each individual player, the game is by no means one of the longer-lasting ones in the package. Contributing to this is is the fact that you always move at the same speed while the ghosts move progressively faster as you progress through each of the level. Some way to gain a power-up for extra speed after a certain number of levels completed probably would have helped matters here.

In Dig Dug (7/10), you play a digger character which closely resembles a space explorer who must defeat enemies by either causing large rocks to fall upon them or shooting them with a piece of string that you can shoot out of your hand continually, a la Spiderman. You score points by doing this and digging your way through mounds and mounds of dirt. After each enemy is defeated, you will advance to the next level, in which you must do the same thing, only in each advancing level, the enemies are faster and tougher, so in some ways, the game follows in the footsteps of Ms. Pac-man. Only this time, you are given more freedom in which to move around, thanks to a lack mazes around which you must go in order to avoid foes. This does not necessarily have any effect on the difficulty of the game, as the enemies are able to move noticeably faster than you are and they can pass through in any direction with ease, while you can only pass through dirt going up, down, left, and right only.

Namco Museum for GBA is quite different from its GameCube and Xbox cousins in that it only contains five games, while those two versions include those five games, plus Pac-man, Pac-Attack, Pac-mania, Pac-man Arrangement, Galaga Arrangement, Dig Dug Arrangement, and Pole Position II. Considering what other developers, like Aspyr, have done with their retro compilation packages, that is, allow you to play 55 games from the Atari 2600 on your GBA, there really is not a good reason why these eight extra games could not have been included on the GBA version of Namco Museum also. Additionally, unlike in the GameCube and Xbox versions of the game, you are not able to record your high scores, which in some ways is a letdown, but ideal for those that are not really interested in establishing a high score that they will have to remember to try to pass, just seeing how far they can get each time. Thankfully, the game does give you the opportunity to at least look at your high score after a game has finished, which will therefore give you the chance to record your score on a separate sheet of paper or something.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/07