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Museum

As of now, we've seen each of the five Namco Museum titles released in the US. Why only five, when Namco has created many many arcade games? One for each letter in Namco. The Museums each have six classic arcade games from Namco's past. Some of them, such as Toy Pop, Tower of Druaga, and Phozon, were never released in America. It's great they decided to finally release them over here because I like these never-released games a lot. Phozon is one of the more unique arcade games I've ever played, and the ideas in Toy Pop and Druaga are rather unique, if not un-arcadelike. Here's a list of the games in each museum.

Namco Museum I Pac-Man Galaga Pole Position Bosconian Rally-X Toy Pop
Namco Museum II* Super Pac Man Xevious Mappy Gaplus Grobda Dragon Buster
Namco Museum III Ms. Pac Man Galaxian Pole Position II Dig Dug Phozon Tower of Druaga
Namco Museum IV Pac Land Assault Ordyne The Genji & Heike Clans The Return of Ishtar  
Namco Museum V Pac Mania MetroCross Baraduke The Legend of Walkyrie Dragon Spirit  

*The Japanese version of Namco Museum II had Cutie-Q instead of Super Pac Man. From what I can tell, Cutie-Q is a video-ized pinball video game that wasn't very good at all, so I guess Namco scrapped that in favor of Super Pac Man, which isn't very good either. Oh well. :)


Here's my review of Namco Museum 3.

I am fortunate to have been able to grab a copy of Namco Museum #3 way before it was released (I snagged the Japanese version), and I must say it was more wonderful than I expected. Namco Museum #3 includes six classic arcade games: Galaxian, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, Pole Position II, Phozon, and Tower of Druaga. These are available to play any time within the museum menus, and each game has it's very own room in the museum. The museum itself is a 3D virtual reality building in which you can wander around, look at the beautiful graphics, and view the scanned pictures of actual arcade memorabilia. One annoying thing is that the scanned arcade machine art and schematics and such are all scans of Japanese manuals and machine art. I was rather disappointed they didn't scan new art in for the English version.

Some of the more interesting exhibits (there's two exhibit rooms for each game) include pictures of manual scans, arcade machine art scans, actual 3D models of the arcade machines, 3D models of the characters from the games, and so on. In Ms Pac Man's room, you can visit Pac Man's home, look around at Ms Pac Man and the Pac Puppy (I think his name was Chomp-Chomp in the cartoon series) and such. Dig Dug shows you a small cave and then a sort of zoo area where you can look at bouncing 3D models of the Pookahs.

The games themselves are pixel perfect, of course. In the actual games, you can access menus that will let you display the game sideways or flat (for full screen, you can tilt your TV sideways and play it the way it was intended), change the dip switches, change options, and such. When each game boots, you actually see the machine go through it's ROM tests. This can* be bypassed, though.

The movie theater lets you view slide shows of all the different graphics from the games themselves, and listen to the music and sound effects. In the 3D modeled movie theater, you can look at 3D models of Mappy, the Pac family, the ghosts, and so on.

And last, but certainly not least, is the statistics sheet. If you have a Memory Card in your Playstation, it will record all your scores for the games, allow you to use different save files (for multiple players) and gives you a wide variety of statistics about your games. At the end of these statistics, the game gives you a letter grade, according to your performance in the game. It's VERY hard to get a high grade.

Overall, I'd recommend any of the Namco Museum titles for any arcade classic enthusiast.





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