Namco Museum

"Namco, Namco, Namco…why do you grieve me so?"

Think about it for just a moment: a large, thoughtfully-arranged collection of your classic arcade games would be a thing of beauty and a joy forever—and yet, instead, you’re content to shovel bucketloads of hasty, slipshod compilations at us, pissing away all the good will you had ever accrued. ‘Tis a sad affair, and I aim to show you—the reader—just HOW sad it is.

First, and most famously, Ms Pac-Man. Although what curious mental process lead Namco to include this and leave out the original is beyond me, the sequel is also undeniably a great game. Some claim it’s better than the original; I disagree, but it’s still excellent. Here, we are given the option of playing a scrolling version, in which only part of the map is visible at a time, or a full-screen version, with miniscule playing field. Now this is just silly: self-evidently, you cannot play Ms Pac-Man without being able to see the entire playing field. I mean, okay, you can, but not knowing exactly where all the ghosts and uneaten dots are puts you at a serious disadvantage, which becomes more pronounced the further you get. So, if you’re at all serious about the game, you go with the full-screen. Which, actually, is much smaller than it has to be—there
Are wide top and bottom margins, due to your score being displayed at the top and your level-in-fruits/life count at the bottom. Namco could easily have worked around this problem by relegating this information to the left and right of the screen—which are entirely empty—but, unfortunately, this would have required them to care, and thus there was really never any chance of it happening. Still, you CAN play it, and it remains an all-time classic, even if you likely already own it in several forms.

Dig Dug. Dig dig dug dug. Dug dug dig dig. Dig dig diggety dug. What is it about this game that makes it so darn fantastic? It’s difficult to say for sure, but it seems that there’s just something about burrowing underground and exploding monsters with a bicycle pump that speaks to the human soul on a deep level. Nobody can deny the greatness of this game! Dig! And, furthermore, dug! Actually, this was probably the main reason I purchased this compilation—I was wavering, but I thought, hell, it’ll be great to be able to play Dig Dug on the go, with the other games as icing on the cake. Yeah! Dig Dug! So perhaps you can imagine how IRATE I was to find that this game can ONLY be played with a scrolling playfield. That’s right: there’s NO FULLSCREEN OPTION. Why Namco deigned to provide us with such a feature in one game and not another, I have no idea, but it utterly ruins the game for me. Let me spell it out again: They. ruined. Dig Dug. Can you even conceive of the magnitude of this crime? The mind boggles. It’s not a matter of Namco being colossally incompetent, but rather that—to build on a theme—they just. don’t. care. THEY don’t give a toss about whether their classic games are actually playable or not—and why should they? There’s money to be made, boys! Heave ho!

The fact that Galaga and Galaxian would be rendered literally unplayable without a fullscreen display compelled the sluggards at Namco—poor lambs!—to provide them, and the games work well enough, though they certainly aren’t my among my favorites. Galaxian has a certain nostalgic appeal for me, since, when I was young and in the throes of orthodontia, it was one of the arcade games thoughtfully provided by the staff to distract us hyperactive children and thus stop us from eating the furniture, but when you come right down to it, it’s incredibly shallow. Galaga is deeper, but it still kinda bores me. I know some of you like it, and this version is perfectly acceptable, but it doesn’t send me personally into spasms of delight.

Of Pole Position, the less said the better.

Et…c’est tout! That’s all! Five games, some of them botched by shoddy porting. Given the number of great classics in Namco’s library that COULD have been included, this is simply unacceptable. And here’s the final insult: no battery backup. That’s right…in a collection of games the ENTIRE POINT OF WHICH is to wrack up as many points as possible…Namco did not see fit to provide a method of, you know, recording your score. Essentially ruining whatever incentive remained to play. The breath, she is taken away.

If Namco had gone the extra mile and included a WHOLE BUNCH of games—or loads of extras (the only discernable ‘extras’ here are a few half-assed ‘tips’ for each game)—or SOMETHING—perhaps I could overlook the fact that some of them aren’t up to snuff, but as it is, this is a pretty feeble effort. Wait, did I say ‘effort?’ Ha ha! Silly me! That would imply ‘effort,’ none of which, it is manifestly obvious, went into the creation of this sorry collection. Konami’s Arcade Advanced suffered from similar problems (not enough games, let alone good games, no battery backup), but at least most of the games included were ones you were unlikely to have already played thousands of times, and there were enough bonuses and enhancements that one got the vague impression that Konami at least had SOME vestigial interest in doing justice to its properties. One gets no such impression of Namco, a company which clearly has no respect whatsoever for the games on which it was built. No, all it does is haul them out again and again and again to make a quick buck, with fast-diminishing returns. Shameful. Perhaps I would be less harsh if not for the way I’ve been enjoying Activision’s exemplary GBA 2600 Anthology of late (Activision: now THERE’S a company that gets it), but this is an insultingly slapdash collection by any standard. I do not recommend it to anyone for any reason, no matter the price.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/01/04