Namco Museum
Score: 80% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Namco Developer: Mass Media Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Arcade/ Action/ Family
Graphics & Sound: The graphics in Namco Museum are arcade-perfect, or at least as close as a TV can compare to a sharp video monitor. The games are not graphically improved (which is a Good ThingTM), although they have borders around them to offset the fact that their aspect ratios are not the same as those of TV screens. Don’t expect anything fancy here -- the games are pre-Crash, and they show it -- but they’re certainly not ugly. Okay, well, Galaxian isn’t all that nice-looking, but the rest are just fine, thank you very much. Sound is, similarly, what you’d expect with emulation, or at least tight simulation, of old arcade games. Bleeps, bloops, and other such wonders that came out of those old Yamaha chips are what you’re going to hear. The sound seemed a little tinny and muffled to me; it may just be Happy Sappy Delusion Syndrome, but I could swear that Galaga’s music rang a little bit clearer back in the arcades. Once again, nothing spectacular, but nothing you wouldn’t expect either. The theme song for the GD-ROM itself is something of a remix of sounds from the various games on the disc, which gets somewhat irritating after a bit. Not that you’ll be spending much time on the menu, mind you.
Gameplay: Which brings me to my biggest bone to pick with Namco Museum. Yes, it has six excellent games, four of which I still play regularly. Yes, the games hold up under scrutiny of the modern eye -- show me a shooter more entertaining than Galaga and I’ll show you... er, something that doesn’t exist. But that’s all this disc has. Six games, plus one little Kaboom rip-off for your VMU, are what you get for a rather hefty price-tag. The PlayStation Namco Museums had all sorts of useless stuff along with the games -- cabinets, pamphlets, everything. This is bare-bones and stripped. Now, don’t get me wrong. The games are uniformly entertaining. You have Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, neither of which I feel need any sort of explanation or introduction. Then you have Galaxian, and its new and much spiffier child, Galaga. I would be willing to bet that I plunked enough quarters in Galaga machines throughout my life to pay for two or three stand-ups. The game is fantastic, and I still break it out to this day. Galaxian is good as well, but you’ll find yourself coming back to Galaga more often than not. Pole Position was a nice little racing game (although Pole Position 2 was a good bit better), but it’s hell to control with a standard Dreamcast controller. I’d imagine that a steering wheel would be more appropriate, but that being neither here nor there, Pole Position is a good way to waste a few minutes when you don’t want to play a serious racing game. And then there’s Dig-Dug, that cute yet fiendishly addictive game where you inflate dragons and cute little red dudes until they pop. It’s a quintessential Japanese game, and also one game that I’ve never tired of. I probably couldn’t buy a stand-up cabinet with the money I’ve put into Dig-Dug, but it’d be pretty close. So the games are overall fantastic. If they’re not truly emulated, it’s pretty close -- I didn’t bother to do the Galaga no-bullet trick to test it, since that could have been added to the simulated version as well. But there’s just not enough extra meat on the GD-ROM’s bones.
Difficulty: Like all good arcade games, the games on here start off relatively easy and ramp up quickly until you’re plunking in quarters like no tomorrow. Of course, since you have infinite quarters, that’s not really a problem. Dig-Dug is the only game that supports continuing from where you lost your last try, however, so don’t expect to get too far into any of the games without serious practice. Of course, if you practiced in the arcades in the past, you’ve got all the practice you need. And I actually found that I played Galaga considerably better with the Dreamcast controller than I ever remembered playing with a joystick or that little toggle-thing.
Game Mechanics: As far as game mechanics go, Namco Museum is spot on. The buttons (for games that have them) are trivially easy to figure out, and the controls are generally tight. As I stated earlier, chances are a steering controller would make Pole Position considerably more playable, but the other games work just fine with the analog stick. I found myself doing superbly in Galaga, and not too shabbily in Ms. Pac-Man (which I hadn’t played in ages). For all their lack of graphical panache and musical style, these games had it where it counted -- tight controls and gameplay. There’s nothing wrong with the games in Namco Museum. The problem is in the collection itself. For the price you have to pay, you get... the games. The PlayStation versions offered a good bit more interesting stuff, and it’s not like the Dreamcast runs the games any better. If you only have a Dreamcast, you may want to pick up Namco Museum and relive the classics, but otherwise you’d do better to find copies of the PlayStation titles and relive them in their full glory. They’re great games, but they should have been treated better.
-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon
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