Namco Museum DS for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

Though classic arcade compilations are an easy way for rights-holders to make a quick buck, they at least make for fun little handheld experiences when done right. Namco went with M2 for this latest collection of games, and the development team did as much of a bang-up job on this collection as it did for Konami on that company's collection released earlier this year. The downside: the stack of games in Namco Museum is a lot lighter, made even more so with a couple of duds you'll never really play. Most of the Namco Museum DS is an old-school experience, but the one game that's more contemporary is Pac-Man Vs., an excellent conversion of the impressive Namco/Nintendo collaborative experimental freebie for the GameCube. The original release on the Nintendo console pushed the idea of "connectivity" as integral gameplay by incorporating a linked Game Boy Advance for multiplayer: on the GBA, players controlled Pac-Man in a classic 2D view, while as many as three players controlled ghosts on the GameCube trying to catch Pac-Man and take his place. It was incredibly competitive, fun and social, but required a big investment…and a lot of convincing that it's fun to play four player Pac-Man. On the Nintendo DS, that experience is moved to the handheld and its inherent ability to link wirelessly using only one copy of the cart. Because three players receive the Download Play file at the same time the initial loading is a bit on the long side, but once everyone has the download the transfer time is no longer an issue. On the Nintendo DS, everyone has the limited 3D view, but the player assuming Pac-Man's has the upper-hand with the overhead 2D maze to keep an eye on everyone. Pac-Man Vs. is still a lot of fun, even if it's just slightly unbalanced. Practiced Pac-Man players should have no problem dominating the classic mazes, and ghosts only seem to have one strategy from stopping a good Pac-Man player: camping over a power pill. And while the wireless element does free up the tangle, the GameCube version definitely had a better social aspect since players had to exchange controllers after every turn. Now it's all done automatically with very little physical interaction. As a sidenote, it's pretty clear that the original intention was to get Pac-Man Vs. online. The evidence? A menu system with only one available choice: wireless play. It feels like the feature was stripped at the last minute, which is a shame since it would have certainly been a cool addition to the package getting this one on a worldwide server. For the rest of the package, we've got absolutely spot-on emulations of Pac-Man, Dig Dug II, Mappy, Galaxian, Galaga, The Tower of Druaga, and Xevious. Can't go wrong with Pac-Man, naturally, and Galaga still is one of the top classic old-school shooters. Mappy is a cute love it/hate it collectathon classic, and Xevious? It's still a great vertical shooter with some cool two-tier "shoot or bomb" gameplay mechanics. Dig Dug II was a lost sequel when it came out - it's not nearly as approachable as the original game, but there's something about the game that makes it fun. But there are the lamewads. Someone needs to tell Namco that we Americans don't think as highly of The Tower of Druaga as the Japanese branch seems to. We're constantly getting this game shoved down our throats in Namco Museum compilations for the systems, but it's just so bloody dull, drab, and flawed that it's amazing that Namco takes so much pride to include this as a selling point. As an unlockable extra, maybe…but definitely not a key bulletpoint on the short list of features. Another game that seems to be a "warm body" in every Namco Museum is Galaxian. For historical purposes, yes, the game should be acknowledged, but when it's put side-by-side in the same collection as its vastly superior successor Galaga, there's just no real reason to play this game. Knocking those two duds off the list, you're left with five decent classics and one contemporary design, all in a nicely produced collection with that same interface M2 developed for Konami and its Konami Arcade Hits collection released last year. Many of the same features, including the wicked cool "hardcore" option of hitting the DIP switches on the arcade motherboard to adjust each game's settings, are in Namco Museum DS. Also included is the ability to shift each game's screen orientation - by default each of the titles are forced onto one of the Nintendo DS screens and stretched into an exaggerated mess. You can bring the game back into its classic screen orientation, but then the game makes interpolations with the resolution limitations. To get the games to look as proper as they did in the arcade, you'll need to rotate the image and play the system on its side a la Brain Age. Comfortwise it takes a bit to get used to, but the visual trade-off is worth it. To Konami's credit when working with this team for its collection, the publisher opened up far more of its arcade library for its first Nintendo DS collection - Namco's own seems incredibly light by comparison. The inclusion of Pac-Man but not Ms. Pac-Man, and Dig Dug II but not the original Dig Dug tells us that Namco's forcefully withholding games from the compilation for a potential sequel somewhere down the line.

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