Old games never die - they get emulated and encased in
digital museums. Some game companies, like Namco, are big enough to spread
their best titles out over five discs. With Pac-Man
hanging around, you wander the corridors of the Namco Museum once more.
(Namco, 1995)
Namco Museum 3, reprinted in the "greatest hits" range of
Playstation games, contains some of the biggest coin-op successes to emerge from
Japan's video game supergiant - but this volume, also known early on as "Volume
M," also sees the beginning of the Namco Museum collection's shift toward
fighting and RPG-style games.
Ms. Pac-Man, Pole Position II and Dig Dug are probably the main reasons this volume
has seen such wide distribution and a reprint run. The game emulations are
good, but once again, I have to complain about the distracting border graphics
on Ms. Pac-Man...couldn't the game have been emulated more like Dig
Dug, with the score display shifted to the side of the screen, and the maze
given a larger portion of the total screen area? This problem also plagues
earlier volumes' versions of Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man, and I never quite figured out why
these games - surely the best-remembered of any of the games on their respective
volumes of Namco Museum - got this graphic treatment.
Volume 3 sees some major improvements in other areas, however. One can
skip such sections as the miserably bitmapped 3-D "museum" and jump
directly to such features as the jukebox (in which one can look at character
graphics and listen to music and sound effects) and individual games. There are
also drop-down menus in each emulation which allow for a quick and easy exit.
These features - and, quite frankly, the ability to skip through most of the
slow-loading museum scenes - make Volume 3 a large leap for the Namco Museum
series.
One, however, should go through the various museum exhibits at least
once, if only for the opportunity to see Dig Dug's Pookas dancing
around to a hip-hop beat in a rock quarry (!), or Ms. Pac-Man and her
Pac-Puppy dancing (and singing!) to a jaunty rendition of the music
from her game's second intermission scene. It's actually a bit
surreal. The Galaxian room is actually
pretty cool - as one floats toward the arcade cabinet in a corner of the room, a
huge 3-D rendition of the player's ship rises up on a launch pad in the
background and undergoes a pre-flight check before blasting off!
Namco Museum 3 is still incredibly easy to find, and I can honestly give it a
big thumbs-up. It's a major improvement in Namco's classic emulation series.
Rating:
Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and
addictive game.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and
addictive game.
