The Final Word game review

Namco Museum Volume 1 -- Namco

The dream of unlimited free credits comes to life for Pac-Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Bosconian, Rally-X, and New Rally-X. Namco Musuem Volume 1 is the first in a series of Namco compilations of classic hits for play on the Sony PlayStation.

Jester
This is a great disc. No doubt about it, being able to play arcade perfect versions of Pac-Man, Galaxian, Bosconian, and the rest is more fun than one person should be allowed to have. As I said the games are great but the museum really sucks. First imagine a slow choppy Doom wannabe engine, then throw in a museum that spends two to four seconds downloading anything you want to see. Then toss in a bunch of museum items of dubious quality (a photo of all the arcade boards is included. Why?!?). You'll look through it once and will probably be tired of it before you've seen everything, which doesn't matter because unlike the Williams' disc there isn't much here. Just play the games.

R.I.P.
I'm really glad to see companies re-issuing their classic arcade titles for the home consoles. But on the other hand, it's kinda sad that it's taken so long to get these conversions on the home consoles. I was really pleased with the extra option available with Pac-Man and Galaxians to set the display for arcade aspect on a rotated monitor. My only serious problem with this title was the "museum" portion, which to be blunt, sucked. The thought was there though, I just think that if you're going to go to the effort to showcase an item graphically, that you should at least make the item readable. The photos were all shot at such a low resolution that when you look at the text on book covers, or the photos of circuit boards, you say "yeah, that's a nice blob". Also, I had hoped that after going to such an effort to show magazine covers, that they could have presented the contents as well. Oh well... The games themselves are excellent and play exactly as remembered. They even retained all of the classic bugs that I know of, like the Galaxians bug that allows you to turn off enemy shots for the whole game. One last thing to note is that if you plan on playing Pole Position, you better have an analog controller... period. I can't wait for volume 2!

>>>>> 42.0/50 <<<<<		Jester	R.I.P.
Graphics		3.0	4.5
Sound		3.0	4.5
Gameplay/Control		5.0	5.0
Longevity/Playability		4.0	5.0
Overall		4.0	4.0
Total		19.0	23.0

(10/96)