Namco Museum 50th Anniversary review

“It belongs in a museum!” cried Indiana Jones shortly before being punched over the side of a storm-tossed boat. He may have been griping about the fate of some shiny bit of treasure, but don’t we all like to think he was actually talking about Pac-Man, the coin-guzzling eat ‘em up from the early 80s?

Indeed, I’m pretty sure he’d take umbrage at the idea that past arcade classics like Defender and Space Invaders should be hoarded away, and should instead be displayed proudly for people to play and experience for themselves; that, like his father before him, we need to appreciate our past and relive it. I’ll bet he’d like that notion And I’ll even bet he’s a dab hand at (whip) cracking the high score table on Mr Do.

For those reasons, every company and its dog is busy releasing retro-tinged collections of their old arcade hits as fast as gamers can snap them up, packaged with a free pair of rose-tinted spectacles and the chance to re-experience their youth. Indy would be proud.

The best complement to give these early arcade games is to their immediacy. Far from the bloated epics and interface nightmares that make up today’s titles, these arcade games from the last century had the ability (indeed necessity) to quickly grab the attention, making instantly clear all they had to offer before challenging the player to constantly better themselves by becoming exponentially faster and harder. What depth. What simplicity. What could be honed for hours, days, and years could all be learnt and understood in the first five minutes.

Which is exactly how long I spent playing these games. (Ho ho!)

Well, not really. Not quite. My journalistic ethics meant I played longer than that, though I must confess, not exactly that long in the scheme of things, and certainly no longer than to the quick realisation that this wasn’t going to be the most fun I’d have this month.

Call Yourself Hardcore?

Put it another way: the arcades never died; they’ve been constantly evolving away from their prehistoric cabinet origins, growing strong, confident legs and populating distant lands. Today their species has spread far and wide: they’re in the mini-games that make up the myriad sub-sections of platformers and action adventures; they’re in the polished hi-def sheen of Xbox Live Arcade’s serious distractions; they’ve bent and squeezed their shape into the comfortable circuits of mobile phones and handhelds; and they’re constantly being reborn and remoulded, templates to a thousand amateur designers in the freeware and shareware PC scene.

To go back to the beginning as this and other packages do is to attempt communication with grunting monkeys, peering into their eyes for that sliver of intelligence that built great civilisations. With the benefit of hindsight, the continuing dynasty of the finest games can easily be traced to their solid foundations, replayed with confidence because of their strong stock.

However, all too often this trip back highlights those weak forgotten, trapped amongst the strong, the ones whose faults are far easier to underline in this modern era, the ones whose links form a weak branch in the family tree that we tolerated then, but now now; further proof that we can never truly go back no matter how many times those merchants of nostalgia want us to.

And Namco sure is a company that likes to go back. Never one to shy away from its heritage, it’s already released several anthologies over several consoles, not afraid to inform the world of its former glories. Indeed, this package features sixteen of the buggers, so before rambling on too much it’s best to take a look at each one and give a short, non-nostalgic critique before we take in the whole package.

Pac-Man

Navigating around a top-down maze eating dots and avoiding ghosts – probably a superfluous description for something so iconic. One of the first arcade games I remember playing and elegant in its simplicity. It lacks something without a proper stiff arcade control stick which the PS2 pad doesn’t really have and, well, classic or not, even when I was young I never liked the tricksy maze layout, repetitive design and the emphasis on pre-planning rather than quick-timing. Oh God, the sacrilege. Billy Mitchell strike me down.

Ms Pac-Man

New maps, updated graphics, a more solid narrative and an innovative gameplay element (moving fruit) – they sure didn’t skimp on their sequels back then. Pac-Man’s paramour still relies on the same mechanics of play as her beau, but plays slightly better with a diluted tint of nostalgia.

Galaxian

An early triumph of audio design for this Space Invaders clone: a thrumming heartbeat of increasing urgency matching the squealing bleeps of the swooping and diving of the alien ships that gather at the top of the screen. The only complaint to make would be the small difficulty of discerning the enemy’s bullets against the background. Otherwise, one of the best games on the package if it wasn’t for its sequel. Though the idea you’ll play it for long is probably laughable.

Galaga

The follow-up to Galaxian, a game that still retains its vintage amongst many of the other disappointments in this package. It’s a wave shooter with a progressively fair difficulty level coupled to a memorably colourful simplicity of design. Moving on.

Dig Dug

Whereas this hasn’t stood the test of time. The idea of moving around the soil of the earth to inflate and burst a selection of weird monsters sounds slightly better than it is. Which is a game with slow controls, boring visuals and a failure to really provide a proper incentive or threat to progress.

Pole Position

Oh dear. Early arcade racers may be one of the few genres that don’t translate well into the modern age given the advances in handling and physics since then. Not until the tweaked thrills of Out Run did the racing game truly get its dues. To play anything before is a historical lesson in arduous control and exploding on the first lap.

Pole Position 2

Which is more of the same.

Xevious

Rhymes with tedious, but it’s not that bad. Graphically distinctive in the grey-metallic threats contrasting with the lush green forests and blue lakes of the background terrain. It’s a vertically-scrolling shooter whose strength, like Galaga and Galaxian lie in its basic calibre. Can you believe Nintendo charged £15 quid for this one game on the GBA? Just wrong

Mappy

Rhymes with crappy. Which it is. A mess of a closed-set platformer in which your little police mouse bounces on trampolines in order to reach stolen goods placed on higher platforms while evil cats chase after you Pac-Man style. Like that game, it’s all too easy to get caught in an impasse which the constant bouncing around doesn’t help make any more fun.

Rally-X

Another derivation of Pac-Man, which this time has you collecting flags in a larger maze before rival cars home into your position and violently dent your bumpers. Suffers from the inability to see the whole screen (relying on your radar to see the flags), thus making it much more difficult and irritating to avoid the enemies that relentlessly circle your position.

Sky Kid

A nice colourful title which, anachronistically, feels like a shareware PC game. It’s a close-range horizontally-scrolling shooter with a stunted, cartoonish style in which you must traverse the skies firing at ground and air targets, scooping up a large bomb and blowing up the enemy base for maximum points. Again, it’s fun, but the idea of having to dip down to shoot diagonally or loop behind planes at your rear is a little too fiddly to work all that well. Fantastically catchy ragtime piano soundtrack, though.

Bosconian

Free-scrolling space shooter tasking you with blowing up the various bases dotted around nearby space before they send out their attack waves to stop you. To cope with the nature of being able to travel in any direction, you ship fires bullets out both the front and back, but it’s a clunky method which involves manoeuvring towards the target to shoot, and obviously does nothing but highlight the genius in evolution that was Robotron’s twin-stick move and fire control system.

Dragon Spirit

A more advanced vertically-scrolling shooter (compared to the others here). With dragons. Technically more accomplished than most in this package, yet also rather dull. It’s a little too slow and heavy-going, and apart from the visual style, not one to stand out from the hundreds of other shooters popping up at the time.

Rolling Thunder

Cor, now this is the game I salivated over in screenshots inside ancient games magazines. Using that classic quest narrative of rescuing the kidnapped girl means a scrolling gun-filled romp against the many, many bad guys that make up your nemesis’ army. Except it’s coin-hungry and difficult, and while it’s not too awful it never gives fair quarter. Rather it’s you that gives it quarters. Or ten pences, or whatever it was they used back then to make this joke work.

Plus there are the bonus games, Galaga ’88 and Pac-Mania, unlocked by scoring a number of points in their respective prequels. They’re both variations on their core themes and slightly more complex riffs on the original but not exactly setting the world on fire.

That’s Your Lot

Phew! Just be glad I wasn’t doing Taito Legends 2 with its 39 games or we’d be here all night. But to address the problems I have with the overall package, most of these games have appeared in some form or another in earlier retro compilations and Namco sees no interest in changing the formula. In fact, they’ve reduced it.

Case in point: the extensive Namco Museum series on PSOne. Understanding, the concept of a museum, this collection of titles provided access to various historic data relating to the subject games. For titles regularly regarded as pioneering, it gave some interesting and entertaining background information as to how they were produced and received. Here there’s nothing. Nothing at all, replaced instead with a solitary menu screen enlivened with the thoroughly pointless addition of a handful of 80s pop tracks playing out in the background. Pointless because, unless you have the decision-making skills of a slow-witted turtle, you’ll be off into the actual pop-free games before you’ve even had a chance to listen to the intros.

And speaking of paucity of content, a boast of 50 years is a rich claim to make when only 16 measly games exist on this package. I’m no expert, but unless compiler Digital Eclipse is struggling with compression technology, this DVD must contain acres of free space. Whither then Ridge Racer or Tekken, or any more modern Namco arcade games that hold no real value now but would do wonders in making this an essential package.

This truly feels like a case of milking it for Namco especially at the atrociously inappropriate full price of around £25 - £30. That the package reveals nothing in the way of extra resource material doesn’t do its suspicions as a cynical and ill-conceived cash-in any favours. This is not value for money and to think that Namco and the rest can get away with releasing such a small handful of ancient games at a premium price is disrespectful to the customer. They could pack this disc. They haven’t. It’s fair time to protest against the economy of retro or we’ll keep on paying the price for far too little.

Still, if you really must buy these games, then import Namco Battle Museum for the PSP where instant arcade play is far more at home on its small portable screen. Otherwise, stick to the future. There’s plenty of modern retro arcade games out there that don’t pander solely to misguided nostalgia for you to get coaxed into buying this.