Namco Museum DS Review

Approaching what amounts to the gaming equivalent of a mid-life crisis, I recently went and paid the talented Retro Chris to make me a bespoke arcade cabinet. It's amazing. Illuminated buttons, coin door, three control panels to take into account vertical and horizontally oriented games, and finished with a Donkey Kong overlay for that special touch. One man's childhood dreams made real, and no, not at all unnecessary and geeky. How dare you. And yes I have seen King of Kong.

But anyway, the point of this increasingly rambling anecdote is that my 26-month-old son is fascinated by it. He eats his breakfast off it, and enjoys Pac-Man [called 'Nack-Nang' by him] so much he hilariously mimics the 'Wacka-Wacka' noises whenever he sees the little yellow blobhead. So when Namco Museum DS arrived for review, he took one look at the box art, held it up to me, giggled and started making more 'Wacka-Wacka' sounds, while informing me of the colours of the ghosts on the back. Needless to say, he enjoys Pac-Man on the DS just as much, mainly to watch the pill-popping fiend get eaten. Repeatedly.

Released on every platform know to man since about 1994 (man, that's retro in itself), the latest Namco Museum is another unapologetic slice of retro bundling which pulls together the usual suspects for yet another outing. Pac-Man, of course, is present and correct, as is Galaga, Galaxian, Mappy, and Xevious, along with some rather less stellar candidates: Dig Dug II, The Tower of Druaga. Two 'secret' games also form part of the package - Super Xevious and the rather pointless Dig Dug II - Old Version), which you can unlock by meeting certain conditions.

Why such obvious well-known titles as Rally-X/New Rally-X, Ms Pac-Man, Pole Position, the original Dig Dug, Pac-Land, Pacmania, Motos and Gaplus couldn't have been thrown in can only be down to a mean spirit rather than cartridge space considerations. One of the recent collections, Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection, featured 16 titles, so expecting DS owners to be happy with half that seems a little stingy to say the least, but if money's no object, then hey, you'll at least be happy that these are largely perfect ports.

Pac-Man Vs. works a charm on DS - just add friends, preferably old ones who care.

The option to view the game in multiple different ways is a good start. You can choose the top or bottom screen, play them vertically and flip them so the top of the screen is at the left or right, and even in a 1:1 pixel mode that matches the original resolution (even if that means scrolling when you reach the edge of the screen). You can also play them horizontally, both stretched to fit the full screen width or at the correct aspect ratio. It really does cater for any preference, and means that pedants like me can play their old favourites as nature intended.

Although the front-end fonts of each game look a little 'tweaked', shall we say, in-game it's all been left alone, and looks as close to the real thing as is possible on the small screen. Naturally, there are a few obvious compromises you have to take into account/endure when playing them. Horizontally, you're losing maybe 40 percent of the screen area, while playing vertically suffers from the need to position your hands rather oddly when using games requiring a fire button. So, while playing Pac-Man is absolutely fine vertically, Galaga and Galaxian feel unnatural, so it's a trade-off you have to get used to if you want them to look their best. There's also the option to play each game in Smooth or Sharp mode, but the former makes everything needlessly fuzzy, so definitely avoid that one. Elsewhere, you also get the chance to meddle with button configurations and the dip switches (with the stylus itself on a picture of the board, no less!), which set all manner of variables from difficulty and number of lives to when bonus lives are awarded. There are even some 'hardcore' settings, should you feel the need.

Elsewhere, there's scant attempt to cater to the 'Museum' element of the package, with a few measly lines of text to remind people of their legacy. A few Japanese flyers, instruction cards, postcard and a picture of the system board make the cut (if you're lucky), but it's half-hearted in the extreme, though the DS is a terrible means of looking at artwork anyway. On the plus side you do get a music player in order to play all the various ditties and sound effects in every game, but it hardly makes up for the lack of care devoted to the project. If this is a museum, it's a pretty shonky one where the curators snuck out the back for a smoke.

In terms of the games, Pac-Man and Galaga are the obvious standouts, truly deserving of their classic status and deserving of any videogamer's collection somewhere. Galaxian may have been massively superseded by Galaga, but still has a special place in our hearts, jolly little collect-'em-up platformer Mappy never seems to get the credit it deserves, while pioneering shooter Xevious possibly gets too much credit for what it brought to gaming at the time (mainly massive scrolling play fields and, for the time, colourful graphics) - despite feeling decidedly uninspiring in terms of the core gameplay. Of course, everyone will still argue to the death over what was really 'classic' and what wasn't, which is why we're still here talking about games which are, in most cases, more than 25 years old. Long may it continue.

The big news here, of course, is the inclusion of the former GameCube exclusive Pac-Man Vs. Originally released as a freebie within the forgettable R: Racing, it will go down in history as the 'big' announcement of E3 2003 - Nintendo's memorable all-time low-point in terms of direction and trade show excitement. On the other hand, it was a game which Shigeru Miyamoto and original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani had a hand in, and was around in an era when gaming connectivity was still something of a novelty. The idea then was that one person played as Pac-Man (viewing and controlling the action in classic top-down maze fashion on the GBA), while the other three players used standard GameCube pads and viewed the action in full (albeit zoomed-in) 3D on the TV.

Fast forward five years, of course, and gazillions of us own wireless-capable hardware, such as the DS, which makes its belated appearance on the handheld all the more obvious - for one thing, it's a whole lot easier to set-up, and not a wire in sight.

There are plusses and minuses in the whole Pac-Man Vs story, though. You absolutely cannot play it as a one-player game (and never could). The option simply does not exist, so in order to make this work Namco Bandai has opted to ensure that your DS owning mates don't require a copy of the game to be able to play it - which, thankfully, rescues this from being a rather pointless exercise and turns it into something altogether more desirable.

God Bless Galaga and all who sail in her.

Given that only about two people ever bought R: Racing [I was young and didn't need the money - Ed], the chances are you'll need a bit of background about the game mechanics of Pac-Man Vs too, so here goes. The premise is excellent, in that one player controls Pac-Man and goes about his usual pill-munching business, while up to three other players control the ghosts with the sole purpose of catching the arch chomper. If, say, you're only playing with one other pal, then the remaining ghosts appear as 'harmless disembodied eyes' (or grey ghosts, officially), changing to the colour of one of the player ghosts when touched and go after Pac-Man. If they catch up with the greedy gobbler, then the player who touched that ghost in the first place gets the points. If you're skillful enough to reduce the number of pellets on screen to 25 or fewer, Pac-Man becomes invisible to the ghosts. Mwahahaha. Once you clear a board, Pac-Man gets 1600 points and the chance to play on the next round.

Another twist is that ghosts can also pick up the fruit. This not only gives them bonus points, but temporarily widens the field of view, so helps when you're chasing after Mr Yellow Belly. So, if you catch Pac-Man you get 1600 points, and then have to play as Pac-Man in the next round. To cut a convoluted story short, the first player to hit a pre-determined point tally (7,000, then 10,000, then 15,000) wins.

As was pointed out back in 2003, the game only really works properly if you have the full complement of four players, and does burn out pretty quickly in terms of long-term appeal. The fact that Nintendo and Namco decided to bundle it with another game tells you a lot about how they felt selling it as a full-priced game, and, again, Namco bundling it within the latest Namco Museum release is another admission of its slightly niche, quirky, throwaway appeal. There's absolutely no doubting it's a fun, addictive little twist on the formula, but if you're effectively only buying Namco Museum on DS for Pac-Man Vs, that's a fairly hefty outlay. One day Namco Bandai will release Pac-Man Vs for a few quid via download on a platform all of us can access, but, for now, it's still burdened by being bundled alongside things most of us don't want. Last time it was the awful R: Racing, then the okayish I-Ninja in some territories, now it's a load of games we already own ten times over.