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| | | Let me just say right off the bat that I bought this solely for Ms. Pac-Man.
Guess I might as well pay lip service to the other games that tag along. "Pole Position II" runs shockingly smooth but the stiff control and flat track don't succeed in making me care too much, and your car going off like an A-bomb the second it touches a pixel of another car doesn't help me like it more.
"Dig-Dug" is pretty good, played vertically--nothing like shooting a hose into someone and pumping 'em until they pop. Dig-Dug also reminds me a lot of Namco's later tunnel-digging game, Mr. Driller. Yay!
"Phozon" is a funky molecular chemistry thing where you play "stick the atoms on the molecule" while other particles pop around and try to hit you. It's tough because you've got to run into the wandering atoms from the right angle to build your molecule the right way. Nifty graphics, the gameplay is a bit more frustrating than exciting, however.
"Galaxian"... well, it's no "Galaga." Really slow shooting and slow moving--whose brilliant idea was it that you could only have one bullet onscreen at once? Very challenging but not very fun... I never really liked Galaga much in the arcades though.
And "Tower of Druaga"... hurg! ;P Let's just say that the only good thing about this sluggish and pointless maze game is that it was used as the name of a mode in Mr. Driller: Drill Land. Horrifically ugly color patterns, terrible sound, and why the heck do they make a character whose sword-stroke does not extend beyond his own body's hit detection border? Wow.
But yeah, "Ms. Pac-Man" is here in her full tate mode glory--the only home port to give you the missus at the full arcade single-screen resolution, as far as I am aware.
All the PS1 Namco Museums, when it comes to that, are perfect ports, offering plenty of configuration options, tate mode when applicable (it's rotated clockwise rather than counter-clockwise like every other tate game out there, but oh well), and memory-card saved high-score tables even for games that don't normally track high-scores. The game selection is sometimes hit or miss and the extensive "Museums" where you can view scans of arcade fliers and boards seems likely to appeal only to an extremely hardcore few, but all in all this is the way game compilations should be made. Well done Namco. |
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| | | | I should note that all the PS1 Namco Museum games with vertical screen modes have the screen rotated the opposite way of any otherh "tate" mode games: you have to turn your monitor 90 degrees clockwise rather than counter-clockwise. Doh. |
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| | | Well, now I'm totally in love with this version of Dig Dug. The screen shows at a gorgeous 1:1 pixel presentation, even in horizontal screen mode, with some scrolling--you can turn that scroll off, but then you can actually dig your way OFF THE SCREEN, as can be seen near the end of this video:
Anyway, Dig Dug, I wuv woo. This game disc is pretty much permanently installed in my US PS2 as of now. : D |
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| | | Ms. Pac-Man's default, non-rotated display is slightly scaled down to fit the whole thing on screen, rather than scrolling like Dig Dug.
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| | | | The dots blink slightly faster here than in Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man on PS4 (see entry 1336): they toggle to visible or invisible every eight frames here, vs every 10 in the Arcade Game Series version. |
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