Old games never die - they get emulated. Fortunately,
one of Japan's greatest exporters of video game hits has built a museum around
several of its most popular titles. With Pac-Man at
your side, you wander the corridors of the Namco Museum, where you may examine
classic video game sales brochures, promotional items, posters, and the arcade
cabinets themselves - which contain, naturally, the actual games.
(Namco, 1995)
A fantastic idea in a so-so package, Namco Museum's first volume on
the Playstation is a mixture of picture-perfect emulations and a not-so-perfect
framing structure. The thought of all the extra material is great in theory -
and it has turned out to be one of the "compelling applications" for
the DVD format. But in Namco Museum, these nifty ephemera from the 80s
are presented to you as exhibits in clumsily bit-mapped hallways and rooms which
aren't even as convincing graphically as the Windows 95 "maze" screen
saver.
And while I'm fully aware of the fact that
Pac-Man, Galaga, Pole
Position, Bosconian and others originated in Japan, it's a little annoying
that all of the "exhibits" originate in Japan. Very few of
them, if any, have English subtitles or equivalents. I can handle Japanese
movies with their original audio and English subtitles, but I can't read
Japanese. So quite a few of the brochures and other items are useless - if
almost pretty - to look at. And why is each game's motherboard on display?
There is no accompanying information, just another badly bit-mapped shot of a
board with a chipset. If it were up to me, I would have used the otherwise
pointless motherboard shots to display information about the processor(s) used,
the speed of those chips, and a comparison of how slow those are compared to,
say, a Pentium 2 chip or the Motorola 68000 chip that drives the Playstation
itself.
But there are numerous great things about Namco Museum. The
emulations are almost perfect, though some of them - which you can see best with
the Galaga and Bosconian screen shots here - have been slightly
reformatted to, as the disclaimer says, fit your TV. The score and high score
displays have, in most cases, been relocated to a sidebar which allows the
actual playing field to retain its tall rectangular ratio. An exception to
this, sadly, is Pac-Man, which is framed by distracting (and not very
good) cartoon character graphics. This is a shame since Pac-Man could
have easily been reformatted in the same way as Galaga and
Bosconian. And just so you know, this emulation of Pac-Man,
annoying border graphics and all, is recycled in Namco's 20th anniversary
Pac-extravaganza Pac-Man World.
I do have one odd feature to praise, however: the game-specific music. In
the badly bit-mapped corridors, you're treated to a generic new age drone so
drowsy, it'd put Yanni to sleep. But once you enter the area containing the
arcade cabinet, you're treated to a new rendition of that game's musical theme
or themes. Though it's not like John Williams composed the high score screen
music from Pole Position, and Galaga's fighter capture tune isn't
going to be compared to Mozart anytime soon, someone turned these catchy little
barely-a-song snippets into fantastic, more fully-orchestrated suites which
really keep the original flavor, but add a little more music density. Don't go
stampeding straight to the machine - walk around the room, and listen to the
music. Chances are you'll hear something from your adolescence that has been
buried in your gaming consciousness for years.
Rating:
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
