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| | | Bought this one for Assault--you don't suppose that Namco spaced out the good games among the mediocre ones on purpose, do you?
"The Return of Ishtar" is a very unusual old mazey game where you control two characters at once: one with the D-pad and one with the four face buttons, each also gets one shoulder button for an attack. Um, very hard and not particularly rewarding, and AI is dumb, the mazes (at least the first couple) are simple yet baffling because the screen only shows a very small section at once, and the graphics and sound are not particularly good. Probably a lot more fun if you played cozy with a significant other on the same controller.
"The Genji and the Heike Clans" is a rather bizarre action game with I guess samurai or ninja played in at least three different modes: normal sidescroller, super-zoomed-in sidescroller, and overhead/isometric scroller. The graphics are ugly, the controls unforgiving, and the gameplay baffling: what sane designer would make a ledge with a constant stream of baddies spawning immediately beneath it, so they just lump up at the bottom waiting for you to jump down (you have no alternative); or make a mode where you're forced to run very quickly forward as big skeletons with sword arms far longer than yours walk up and whack you, with no way for you to avoid them? Ugh.
"Ordyne," a quirky horizontal shooter with colorful, playful graphics and characters and some nifty large-scale sprite rotation effects, is fun but very quickly gets difficult. To buy powerups you have to pick up money items that appear after you wipe out a full enemy formation, then steer your ship into a floating store that happens by. The problem is that the stores only come by at distinct, rather long intervals, and you can only buy one powerup at a time, no matter how much money you have, and you lose all your powerups each time you die, with no way to recover them, so the net result is that if you die you're pretty much screwed when you respawn.
"Pac-Land" seems like an excellent port of the old, odd running-and-jumping arcade game... not sure if it's really fun yet as I can't seem to figure out how to jump past the swimming pool on level two. ARgh.
But "Assault"--oh my. This game amazed me back in the arcades and it's still mightily impressive here, and I doubt the full-screen rotation and scaling could have been any smoother in the arcade itself. There are two control options, both of which work well in their way--shame this came out before dual-analog, ah well, there's still nothing else like launching your tank up into the air, watching the landscape recede to maplike distance, dropping huge bombs on everything that moves, coming back down and driving out to witness the smoldering ruins. Ahh, Assault, you've finally come home.
Vertical or "tate" mode in these games, as in all the Namco Museum releases, run on a screen rotated 90 degrees clockwise rather than the industry-standard 90 degrees anticlockwise. Kind of sucks if you have a screen set up just for vertical play, as you'll have to flip it 180 degrees if you want to enjoy vertical mode on these compilations. |
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| | | You get past the swimming pool by waggling the stick I think back and forth in midair to extend your running jump off the board into a "glide"--pretty weird and unintuitive gimmick, I guess they must have had a sticker on the arcade cabinet to tell you how to do that? : P
Watched a video of someone who knew what they were doing playing this, there are all kinds of secrets accessed by like pushing against certain things, maybe when having eaten a power pellet.
I thought that was cool but did not enjoy going back to play it again. Exactly *unlike* its inspiration, Pac-Man, the movement in Pac-Land is very slow and kind of momentum-based, where it takes a while to start, stop, and reverse. Bleh. : P
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| | | My disc has 70 read errors starting at 73% through the disc! Man! I dread to think how many of my PS1 discs have read errors...but they've all seemed to work fine in the PS2. And Pac-Land runs okay from the rip, in duckstation...so I guess we're all right. : P Whew!
You can select to start from "Trip" 1 through 5; 5 has a gruesome short hop then long glide over a pool--can't waggle fast enough from DualSense pad, so I guess this'd definitely have to be a stick play! = o |
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| | | Pac-Land is also in Arcade Archives on PS4 and in Pac-Man Museum+ (I have on PS4--see entry 1472--but would get on Steam, $20)--but the M+ version is the AA version, censored to replace Pac-Mom and Baby Pac-Man w/ "Pac-Mom" & "Pac-Sis." ; P
US PS1 disc-only is like $45 on eBay these days. : P JP version is $20. |
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| | | | "The Genji and the Heike Clans" aka "Genpei Tōma Den" is pretty fun, gonna have to give that a go. |
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In DuckStation.
Oh dang, overlooked this on the Cheats page on GameFAQs: there are two hidden versions of two of the games. You can get the updated version of Assault, "Assault Plus," by going into the "X-Room" in the Museum, entering a certain button sequence, and talking to a mysterious person who appears. And there's a "special version" of Return of Ishtar you can get through via a button code in the Return of Ishtar exhibit. Eh well so the read errors that crop up late in the rip of my PS1 disc of the game make my dumped ROM of it lock up when trying to access the museum exhibit rooms, so I guess I have no way to get to those two versions.
Should probably buy the JP PS1 version from the PS Store on my PS3 and dump it--wouldn't get the Museum bg music that way because of a limitation of the PSXtract2021 tool, but could probably still get into the exhibits.
But also I'm not particularly interested in playing those games so I'm not really tempted to spend the money on buying that!
Because basically I'm keeping this rip around to play Pac-Land, which is a hoot. And yeah, way more fun with actual stick waggling on an arcade stick! I think I probably COULD clear the swimming pool on the DualSense, because when I was failing that I was forgetting that in addition to waggling l-r for lift, you also gotta keep mashing the "move right" button. But the wacky mechanics of moving with button mashing and jumping/gliding with stick waggling are what make this game super and arcade sticks are just so much better for big time mashes and waggles. ^ _^
https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Pac-Land says Pac-Land for US arcades was sped up nearly x2 over the JP version--oh hm so I definitely WON'T get the JP PS Store version then! Also it points out that Pac's nose is shortened in this Namco Museum version! (You can see the original long-nose Pac in Pac-Land in Pac-Man Museum Plus, for instance--but that version and the Arcade Archives version replace Ms. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man with generic "Pac-Mom" and "Pac-Sis." : P
Wikipedia says the arcade version of The Return of Ishtar required two players; you can play it one player with a single controller here but you have to move both characters around and it's really awkward. : P
Had thought I was gonna play through The Genji and the Heike Clans (the arcade version, Genpei Tōma Den, was not released in the arcade in the West), but the zoomed-out side-scrolling segments are way too hit-flashy--which is too bad because the game seems pretty wild fun. Oh well, I can watch the wild live-action Japanese TV commercial by holding all four shoulder buttons as the collection boots up, at least. ^ _^
Having just played through Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol.33: Fantasy Zone Complete Collection recently, it's obvious Ordyne rips off loads of stuff from Fantasy Zone, which came out two years earlier. And the gameplay in Ordyne is just mediocre. |
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| | | | Gave in and got the JP version (see entry 1888) so I don't have to worry about crashing going into a museum room with my read-error-rip. : PPP ; D |
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