Oh, the Good Ol' Days of Video Games

This is going to be a short review for me, because the games in Namco’s Museum collection for the Game Boy Advance aren’t all that advanced, and really don’t require a whole lot of description. But I’ll do my best.


20 Year Old Games??

Yes, I know. The games contained in this collection are old, primitive, and not that in-depth. Let’s list them: Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, and Pole Position. Nothing spectacular to most people. So why would I choose to buy this as my first game for Game Boy Advance, a system that is hyped as the most advanced handheld video-game system released?

Simple. I grew up on these games. Yes sir, you can chalk it up to nostalgia. I remember rifling quarters into those big, noisy arcade games down at the 7-11 for hours on end. The first arcade game I ever played was Ms. Pac-Man. And I was damn good at it, thank you very much. Sure, none of these games have amazing graphics, they aren’t too in-depth, and basically you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. But it’s enthralling. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

The Games

Ms. Pac-Man
The true classic. What is so great about a silly, yellow, pizza-shaped creature with a ribbon on its head, running around eating little dots, avoiding ghosts, and occasionally getting powered up so you can go eat those silly ghosts? EVERYTHING! Come on. If you’re at least in your early to mid-20s, how can you not love that great little music, and the blip-blip of eating the dots. This game started my absolute obsession with video games.

The version in the collection is fantastic. There are two ways to play it. You can choose Full Screen, which puts the entire screen on, although it is a little small. There is also the Scroll version that has about half the normal screen visible at once, and it scrolls as you go up and down the screen. You can also manually scroll with the L or R button. I personally like the Full Screen as I like to see everything all at once.

Aside from the two versions, it’s a perfect version of the game. Everything is here, and it brings back so many old memories playing the game.

Dig-Dug
One of the other games I remember playing non-stop. The music is very catchy, that’s for sure, and the premise is fairly simple. You have this little guy, who looks like he’s dressed in a space uniform. The game takes place underground, and when you move you clear out tunnels. There are varying numbers of enemies, of two different kinds. Normal little goobers, and dragons who can spit fire. Your job is to either dig out tunnels underneath rocks that fall and crush the enemies, or to shoot them with your gun type thing a number of times, which inflates them and they eventually blow up. Once you’ve cleared the level of all the monsters, you go on to the next.

It’s very simple, but also very addictive, even though it once again is very repetitive. It also gets really hard. Luckily there is an unlimited continue. As you get to later levels, it’s very rare to get through more than one level without continuing. The bad thing is, I have never come to an end of levels. I’ve gotten as high as the 60th level, which actually took more than an hour, and it still kept going so I gave up. I don’t even know if there actually is an ending, but if there is, I’m gonna find it some day. The version on the collection is an exact copy of the arcade game, with everything intact.

Galaga
A good shooting game. You control a little spaceship, and the only controls you have are to move it left and right across the bottom of the screen and press the shoot button. I don’t think there is anything simpler than this. You have enemies that come down from the top of the screen in varying patterns shooting at you, and once you’ve killed them all you move on to the next level. Every few levels there are “Challenging Stages” which are just a number of strings of enemies that fly in a pattern without shooting and the challenge is to see if you can shoot them all before they fly off the screen. The best part of the game is that there are certain enemies that can capture your ship, and if you have an extra ship remaining you can then shoot that enemy and get your ship back so you now have a double ship to play with, which makes the game much easier.

Once again, I have never gotten to any kind of ending, although I’ve only gone through 16 stages I think. The version is once again just like the arcade version with everything complete within it.

Galaxian
This was the first version of Galaga, and was made in something like 1979. It’s really primitive, slow, and pretty much crap. I never played it before, and I only played it in this collection once. It sucks. There’s no reason to play it over Galaga, unless you’re weird.

Pole Position
Another game that I could have done without. It’s a racing game, but there is only one track, the controls are so sensitive that it’s just plain annoying, and there is no real point. You race around the one track, and the game is over. They could have left this off and included something much better, like Spy Hunter.


Why you would want to buy this?

This is a game you play for some good old-fashioned, mindless fun. There’s no thinking involved, it’s simply for pure enjoyment. If you’re in your teens or even younger, these games aren’t what you’re used to, and you might find them too primitive. But you might also find yourself surprised at how the simplest seeming things can sometimes be the most fun too. And if you do remember these games, you have to love them, and it will bring back a lot of good memories, and just plain fun.

The other good thing about this collection is that although the games are repetitive and simple, that's their beauty at times. Often with other games with stories, plots, whatever, after you finish the game a couple times, they get boring. But the games in this collection never change. You might think that’s boring, but they’re great when you just want to take a few minutes and have a little fun. There is no long game involved. You can play for five minutes and get as much satisfaction out of it as if you played for hours on end. It’s a great diversion from most games these days that take fancy strategy guides, and so much involvement that you forget there is a real world out there.

You probably wouldn’t want Namco Museum to be the only game you owned for the Game Boy Advance, but I think it is a very good addition to anyone’s collection.