Genre: Puzzle
Publisher: Namco
Developer: Digital Eclipse
Release Date: August 30, 2005

In all honesty, I can sum up Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary with one simple sentence that seals its fate:

This compilation disc manages to make Ms. Pac-Man…not fun.

Really, now. That in and of itself really should be cause for me to wrap up this review, send it off, and get some sleep. How do you make Ms. Pac-Man not fun anymore?

I’ll tell you how.

You stick it in the blandest, most bare-bones excuse for a compilation ever (even by budget-game standards)--and then you mess with her gameplay.

I’ll take on each point one at a time.

The root title of the game is called Namco Museum. However, there is no museum to be found. Anywhere. In most previous Namco Museum games (most notably the ones for the PSX), this was not the case. You could find obscure trivia for all of the included classic games within each volume. Pieces of history. Developer tidbits. Crazy stuff. The original PSX Collections are almost out of circulation by now, and all of these extras could have easily fit onto a single DVD. Even the last Namco Museum on PS2 spiced things up with Arranged (re-worked and re-interpreted) versions of their classics in addition to the regulars. Here? Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zippo.

Other people have already said this, but for a 50th Anniversary celebration, they seem not to be too proud of the landmark.

Well, enough bugging about extras for a second—after all, if the title proves to be an easy and cheap way to get a large collection of classic games all in once place, things should still be golden, right?

Alas, it’s still not that easy.

Let’s look at the game roster. We’ve got Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (the classic yellow-pizza dot-munchers); Galaga (a game which I personally could never stand); Galaxian (Namco’s answer to Space Invaders); Pole Position and Pole Position II (the incredibly awesome driving classics); Rolling Thunder (…Shinobi with guns?), Rally X (free-racing where you cheat with dustclouds), Bosconian (a free-roaming space shooter, not too bad), Dragon Spirit (a medieval-themed top-down shooter), Dig Dug (whose main character was recently made five hundred times more badass than he ever needed to be in Namco X Capcom), Sky Kid (a World War-themed biplane game), Mappy (…someone help me out here), and Xevious.
Should you meet a few score requirements, you’ll be able to unlock Pac-Mania (the pseudo-3D Pac-Man challenge) and Galaga ‘88 (a re-working of the classic that many people look upon fondly, including myself).

Bare-bones compilation or not, it’s a pretty impressive lineup at a fairly good price—definitely something that might bridge generation gaps in quite a few families. Unfortunately, something’s wrong, even here. I don’t know if it’s a fault of emulation, or un-optimized code, or heck, maybe I just got a bad retail disc—though I doubt the latter is true. All I know is that there’s a distinct lag between button/pad input and actual on-screen movement.

No, it’s not my television, all of my other games respond fine. It’s not my wireless controller, because I plugged in a standard Dual Shock 2 and got the same results. The lag’s about a half-to three-quarters of a second, but it really, really throws you off. Testing it among friends yielded the same dismal results. Want to make a split-second turn in the Pac-games? Sorry, prepare to have your response time cut in half. The Pole Positions? Between the lag issue and the lack of a true steering-wheeler controller, forget about it. At least half the games suffer from this (Bosconian, however, was surprisingly playable and even more surprisingly quite fun. So was Sky Kid.)

And Galaga… oh, lord. Galaga is a nightmare now. It’s all one can do to fire random, unorganized shots and hope something hits.

The above serves as the final nail in the coffin for the game—what good is a collection of classics if all it does is make you look up the number of your nearest bar or bowling alley to see if they have Ms. Pac-Man still in it?

The graphics, at least, are faithful to the arcade originals, though that’s not an immense feat to pull off. The sound may or may not be an octave deviant from the original arcade, but since I don’t have any original arcade machines around (and I don’t completely trust emulators on this front), we’ll chalk that up as a moot point. The only new sounds and visuals to be found are in the “virtual arcade,” where you choose which game you wish to play. It actually looks decent—you swivel around a bunch of arcade machine models in first-person mode, while a few ‘80s licensed tracks play in the background. It gives you somewhat of a feel of stepping into an arcade over 20 years ago and having your pick of the litter.

Unfortunately, it’s also the main source of load time for the game—upwards of 20 seconds to load the interface, as opposed to 3-5 seconds of loading any game. Really, if it’s that much work to get it into memory, include an option to just get rid of the swanky polygon arcade altogether and provide an alternate bare-bones list with some pictures, for people who want to just jump into the action. The “virtual arcade” loses its novelty after the first five times you look at and listen to it anyway.

In a day and age where Capcom and Midway (and to a lesser extent, Sega) are putting actual work into their retro game compilations, adding content that is fresh and interesting, and selling it all at an affordable price, Namco Museum 50th Anniversary comes off as nothing more than a cheap (no pun intended) joke. To top it off, half of the games aren’t even playable.

It really shouldn’t have been like this.

Score: 6.0/10