There’s actually a bunch of scanned promotional materials and trivia for each game in the series. The rooms aren’t entirely for show, though. One of my favorite rooms is the one for Super Pac-Man there’s this amusing bar-stage setup with a ghost crowd anticipating an act. When you go through a door leading to a game, you find yourself in a room that’s decorated to be themed (either vaguely or directly) after said game. However, each game in the Namco Museum pentalogy has a first-person perspective that treats it sort of like an actual museum. In this day and age, people are used to navigating menus to get to the games they want to play in compilations. Just as interesting as the arcade games themselves is the presentation. Here we have a collection of arcade hits and they appear just as they would in an actual arcade. Many arcade ports that have been released over the past console generations would be seen as arcade-perfect when trying to be faithful to their original cabinets, but even then, the console hardware may limit at least one aspect about the games in question. That certainly was unheard of prior to the fifth generation of consoles. I suppose it paved the way for Namco’s own ventures in capturing their own arcade lineups as genuinely as possible for the Playstation. To be fair, Williams’s compilation did feature arcade-perfect emulation. I know I’d much rather play Galaga than Defender. Even then, I don’t think Williams (no offense to them) had properties that pack as much of a punch as Namco’s roster. Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits also managed to debut just months prior to the first Namco Museum volume, but that’s all I could think of. Jr” if you’re a SEGA Genesis owner) in the 1994 title, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. The closest thing Namco has done was include Pac-Man and Ms. I don’t think there’s been anything like this before the Playstation arrived into the market. Lastly (for now, anyway), Volume 5 features The Legend of Valkyrie, Pac-Mania, Dragon Spirit, Metro-Cross, and Baraduke. Volume 4 dives straight back into near-unknown aspects with Pac-Land, The Return of Ishtar, Genji and the Heike Clans, Assault (including its Plus counterpart), and Ordyne. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Dig Dug, and Pole Position II, but also features The Tower of Druaga and Phozon. Volume 3 heads back into more familiar places with Ms. Volume 2 goes into somewhat more obscure territory by hosting Super Pac-Man, Mappy, Xevious, Gaplus (which some may know as Galaga 3), Grobda, and Dragon Buster. There were also the rather curious inclusions of Toy Pop and Bosconian. Volume 1 contains some of the popular hits like Pac-Man, Galaga, both versions of Rally-X, and to a lesser extent Pole Position. It’s a nice touch even if this probably meant a ton of money was spent buying the titles in the process. If you were to obtain all of the volumes in their cases, they would spell out Namco’s logo. From the initial release in 1996 to the final one which came out just one year later, that’s a whopping five volumes! It seems to be planned out, though. For this Retro Flashback, I’m going to discuss every single entry in the series and see if they’ve held up over the years. From the original Playstation to the Xbox 360 and Wii, this series has been around and it has brought plenty of Namco arcade classics to whatever home console each installment lands on. In fact, it’s an entire series by itself. Namco Museum is a collection of games from Namco’s past. I’m really going to talk about a whole slew of franchises. Yes, I’m going to be talking about Pac-Man again! Kind of.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |