Reviewed: September 3, 2005
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Namco
Developer
Namco
Released: August 23, 2005
Genre: Arcade
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Everyone
7
8
8
9
8.1
Supported Features
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Video games have been around for over 30 years now, which means we have several generations of gamers out there still playing them. We have the arcade generation who are in their late 30’s to mid 40’s, then there is the NES and Genesis generation, and then we have the next generation that started around the time of the PS2 and Xbox.
While there is certainly some overlap in the people that make up these groups (I belong to all three myself), each era of gaming has a certain distinction when it comes to the games they played and the memories they inspire.
Abandoned in a mall and raised by the Aladdin’s Castle attendant, I grew up with a healthy diet of games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Bosconian, Xevious, and just about every other title that make up the Namco Museum Battle Collection. In fact, going through the listing of more than 20 classic arcade games, there were only four I had never played, two of which I had never even heard of.
For those of you dining with us tonight, here is our menu:
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And 4 Updated Classics
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I suppose I could actually do 21 mini reviews for each of the games in this collection, but chances are if you are interested enough to be reading this review then you already know about the games that make up the Battle Collection. Instead, I will recount a few of my observations from the past 20 hours of thumb-blistering gameplay.
My goal going into this review was to play every game until I had the top score in each. For some, this meant one or two passes, but others, especially the games I had never heard about, it took some additional effort. Wow, is Mappy hard!
The presentation for Namco Museum is as basic as it gets. You have two wheel-like menus, one for the basic games and one for the Arrangements. From here you can either select a game to play or delete the saves for that game. My only complaint with this menu is that the up and down arrows that move the menu are inverted and even after 20 hours I still instinctively hit the down arrow to move down the menu but the wheel spins up.
But poor controls are not just limited to the menu. Things go awry almost immediately after launching Pac-Man, the first game in the menu. The PSP offers you two modes of control; the D-Pad and the analog pad. Keep in mind that nearly all of these games were played with a 3-inch joystick with a big golf-ball sized knob on the end back in the day.
Control problems are twofold. Games like Pac-Man require cardinal direction input (up, down, left, or right). The D-pad is ideal for this but it is just not responsive enough to meet the precision required by the maze games like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. It's also difficult and a bit painful to move diagonally with the D-pad.
On the other hand, the A-pad seems to add some fluidity to the controls but this pad also supports a full range of diagonal inputs, so unless you are right on the money with your pad direction the game won’t register the command. Simply put, “diagonal inputs don’t count” , so Pac-Man will pause in the corner and die because you inadvertently hit down-left instead of true down.
It gets even quirkier in a game like Bosconian that mixes diagonal movements with cardinal directions. In this shooter you have the option to take out base stations by shooting all six pods off the hub or you can launch one shot down the central shaft, all the while fighting off swarms of enemy ships and dodging mines and asteroids.
Diagonal movement is essential in dodging ships and debris and especially shooting the station pods, but the A-pad is just twitchy enough that it becomes very hard to line up a shot on the station core. For me, this meant switching between the A-pad and D-pad depending on what I was doing at the time.
Some games like Rally-X had a noticeable lag between the time you input a direction and the response. This meant that you had to anticipate where you wanted to go in advance and press the direction before the intersection. Of course on the smaller screen, you barely have enough time to reverse direction when a pot hole appears.
And even if there was no lag, some games were just too twitchy to play. Xevious, one of my all-time favorite shooters, was impossible to play, or at least play well. This game requires constant firing at aerial targets while dropping perfectly placed bombs. Bombing a ground target was an exercise in futility. Oddly enough, I have the GBA classic version of Xevious and it plays just fine, exactly like the coin-op.
Other games controlled fine but were hampered by the small PSP screen. In Galaxian, your shots as well as the incoming fire from the swarms of ships above are nearly impossible to see. This makes it hard to aim your shots and even harder to dodge theirs.
Then you had the games that controlled and played just fine. Dig Dug, and Dig Dug II were awesome and so was Mappy. And all four of the “arrangement” games were outstanding in their look, controls, and gameplay.
Each game offers its own set of options including the ability to auto-save high scores, adjust the number of lives, and alter the screen orientation and even the size. Keeping in mind that most all of these games were played on TV’s in a 3:4 vertical mode, they don’t exactly translate to a 16:9 widescreen format all that well.
Namco gives you the original screen layout, which ends up being an unplayable thumbnail, then you can choose the arranged mode, which usually puts the scoring info along the side giving you some greater vertical resolution. You can also flip the screen on the side for the best fit, but this also means holding your PSP at an awkward angle. The controls are also adjusted so up and down are now left and right. There is also a stretch-to-fit option, but this is so distorted that you won’t want to use it. Just imagine a fuzzy 3:4 image stretched to 16:9.
The Battle Collection really shines in the Arrangement games. All of these titles have taken the core game and enhanced it with stunning textures, fluid animation, and full support for the widescreen display and larger color pallet of the PSP. Just comparing the old and new Dig Dug and Galaga games will convince anyone. Rally-X is also an impressive remake, but I’ve played so many variations of Pac-Man that the Arrangement version in this collection was not that remarkable.
The Arrangement versions also allow you to save your progress and continue, even if you died, with a fresh batch of lives and your last score. This was unheard of in the days of token-guzzling games that would at best, allow you to continue while resetting your score to zero.
There is wireless sharing support (a first in North America) for ten games (Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Galaga, Rally-X, New Rally X, Dig Dug, Bosconian, King & Balloon, and Xevious) that allow you to transfer portions of these games to another PSP. These are just small demos that give the players a temporary taste of the full game.
You can also engage in multiplayer gameplay for up to four players with the Arrangement games. And this isn’t just “take your turn” gaming; there is some challenging game modes waiting for you here like being able to turn into a ghost and chase your Pac-opponent.
By todays standards the graphics for the games in this collection are laughable, but for anyone who was playing these when it cost you a quarter, you will quickly realize that these are 100% authentic reproductions of the exact visuals from those games. But unlike the fuzzy CRT’s used back in the 80’s we now have a crisp LCD display that breathes new life into these graphics.
There are a few quirks, mainly ghosting issues on games like Rally-X and Rolling Thunder. Sure, it’s annoying but they still look better than they did on the big TV’s of the 80’s. And what few glitches I did notice were quickly forgotten when I gazed upon the glory of the Arrangment modes. While the gameplay might be out of the 80's the visuals are very close to next-gen.
I appreciated the fact that Namco gave us numerous options for displaying these games, although some games are just beyond the scope of this small screen. There was no display mode that made Galaxian playable unless you are playing in total darkness and only then can you just barely see the shots.
Again, much like the visuals, I’m scoring on authentic reproduction of the sound and music in these games. Every game has those distinct sound effects and quaint music, usually a few synthesized notes that repeat in a harmlessly annoying ditty. Keep in mind these games were in the pre-MIDI days, so everything you hear is old school.
The music does take a few noticeable steps up in quality when you get to the Arrangement versions and the sound effects are a bit more polished, but as a whole, everything still remains true to classic gaming audio.
Assuming you have the desire to play any or all of these games then there is no end to the enjoyment and ultimate satisfaction you will have playing these classic titles on your PSP. I knocked off 20 hours of gameplay in just a few days without even trying; of course 10 of those hours were on a plane and in connecting airports, but I did have other options.
The best thing about these games is that they are generally short, so you can pick up and play almost anytime, and if you find yourself doing exceptionally well and have to stop for awhile, the PSP sleep mode will keep your game fresh for you until you have a few more minutes to spare. This is portable gaming at its best.
The multiplayer modes will also give you some added enjoyment and the game sharing might just motivate a few of your friends to buy their own copy so you can actually play the multiplayer modes.
It probably sounds like I am complaining a lot but many of the games in this collection are permanently burned into my brain from countless hours and tokens spent back in the 80’s, so when I get a perfect visual representation of those games that don’t play the same way as I remembered it kind of bugs me.
A good example is Pac-Man. I know this game inside and out, memorized all the patterns required to get three million points and shut the coin-op machine down; patterns I still remember today, and patterns that don’t work on this version. Same goes for Ms. Pac-Man.
Even though I can’t relive my life from 20 years ago to exact perfection, I have to admit that I still enjoyed myself, despite the funky controls and start-from-scratch gameplay in games that were once second nature. And I won’t deny that these games would all play better on a big console, but for portable arcade gaming, it doesn’t get any better than Namco Museum Battle Collection.