Reviewed: November 16, 2007
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Namco Bandai Games
Developer
Namco
Released: October 23, 2007
Genre: Arcade
Players: 1-4
6
6
5
5
5.5
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
That lovable smiley face is back in 3D and with you behind the controls in the Remix fest from Namco Bandai in Namco Museum Remix. If this sounds like the start of a commercial for the game your right, but I will end the plug right there as well. I am a bit mixed on my feelings for this and many other similar games not only for the Wii console but for the Xbox 360 as well. You know those Xbox live titles that they push out the door but at a much lower price.
Namco Bandai has created some great and very lovable games in the past and need to move on instead of remaking their already big games. Namco Museum Remix is just a remake of several old arcade classics along with several of those classics in their original format, but a couple of the remakes are pretty good.
You get five new games in Remix along with nine arcade classics for your money in this complete package, the remixes are Pac’N Roll, Galaga, Pac-Motos, Rally-X and Gator Panic. All the games are pretty fun in that quick pick up and play style but after several minutes you realize there is not much substantial gameplay or value here.
Your Wii controllers will get a little workout here but the games are not that fantastic and some can be a bit disappointing. The remixes are what the price tag is all about so here goes with a brief rundown of them all.
Pac’N Roll Remix rolls your little yellow smiley down a series of tunnels in what would be a great skate park area. You collect the yellow balls that sort of roll toward you when you get really close to earn points and rush to the finish. In the later levels they introduce harder and more difficult scenarios like ramps but basically you roll around collecting balls. That is the whole theme of the titles in Remix collections of flags, balls or points, not rolling around.
The Galaga Remix is your little guy rolling down a long and curvy chute with a galaxy themed background while you shoot these really cute bugs and flying things. The Galaga Remix is a light gun game but I had problems using the Penguin United light gun for very long due to the constant use of the firing trigger instead of using it to shoot the individual enemies like in most games.
In Galaga Remix you just blindly shoot and try to aim at all the flying and buzzing things and when a red targeting device pops up over one you need to hit that first, it’ll start to shoot back at your little guy. The Galaga Remix is a bit like the original but more of a shoot anything with wings that really doesn’t take a lot of skill in aiming so much as luck.
Pac-Motos reminds me of a bumper car game with you trying to stay on the platform while you try to bounce the other balls and objects off. They throw in stationary objects and bonus objects but the main theme is bouncing the balls off the platform without falling off yourself. This one ends with a sort of boss fight with a big ball with two tunnels rotating around and tossing out balls at you but it ends with you just dodging the tunnels and knocking off the objects it spits out.
The Rally-X was a terrible to control race cart game with you avoiding the other racer as you collected all the flags on the track. This adds in some odd effects when you slip and slide on oil slicks or you can use a smoke screen to blind the other racer but the game is played on a Pac Man track that has all those walls and such. To actually make it around corners you have to try several times to get the car in the right direction as you race past or miss the slot you’re aiming at. The race would have been so much better with a regular track or something else with a lot less turns and corners to try to make in fast moving carts. Not that they could not have done something with this but the controlling of the carts just did not work here and Rally-X is just not fun enough to make it a challenge to continue playing.
The Gator Panic is a smack the gator as it tries to jump out of the caves and eat your friend turtle, more like whack-a-mole with leather suits and teeth. The controls here were fine it just keeps on going until you don’t think it will end. The first round is eight minutes of smacking the gators as they pop out of the same four holes. You simple move the nun chuck control either left or right to hit those two sides, leave it in the middle to hit the center or up to hit the gator coming out of the cave on the ledge directly below the frog who is doing the smacking around.
The rest of the games are the classic arcade games that use the nun chuck or Wii remote controls just as you would on the original arcade games and without using the motion sensors. The nine games that are the old, but classics are Galaxian, Dig Dug, Mappy, Pac & Pal, Cutie-Q, Super Pac Man, Gaplus, Xevious and Pac Mania. I’m just not so sure if all of these are actually qualified to be called a classic.
Although they have revamped the games and used the cartoonish colors and animations of the Wii system to the best of their skills, with some games this works out great but for others it is terrible. The Galaga would have been better off keeping it down a dimension as the things are not so much hard to hit as you simply shoot all over the place and end up hitting them anyway.
The effects and such are not anything spectacular for the Remix games and everything worked out fine for just about everything. There really is not much here as far as graphics as it is all the various cartoonish colors and animations but nothing in anyway to brag about.
The sound as well as the music was fairly decent but again nothing to write home about, actually nothing to write much more about at all. It worked and that was about all there is to it, You could easily turn off the volume and crank up some music on your MP3 player to have more to dance to as you roll your Pac character around.
If you have no arcade classic games for any system or your computer and really want some of these old games, you might get some value here but the cost is just too much unless you really want it. The remix games are kind of cute and fun in their own right but at the $40 price tag I would be hard pressed to recommend this.
Namco Museum Remix is a mixed bag of games as well as a mixed review in quality and what you get. There are some pretty good games but you have to really want them to pay the full price for this Wii game. The Pac Man style is here in droves and you do get the classic versions of some good games but you also get a few that are just plain terrible along with the good ones.