PixlBit

Hi, my name is Cary, and I’ll be your tour guide for the Pac-Man Museum Virtual Guided Tour!  Recently I reviewed Pac-Man Museum at GamerDad.com, but didn’t go into much detail on the games listed in this collection.  So that’s what this blog is for!  Keep your cameras ready, as we might bump into other Namco celebrities like Reiko Nagase, Taki, Valkyrie, or Wonder Momo!  And we’re walking, we’re walking…

Pac-Man

Not much can be said about Pac-Man that you can’t already read about on the Internet.  I could write several blogs about this historical game alone.  But that would take too long, so instead I’ll tell you about the first time I played Pac-Man myself.  It’s actually the first arcade game I’ve ever played, and my number one favorite game of all time, as you can probably guess.  The first time I saw it was actually on TV.  I was about five years old and my dad and I were watching the news.  They showed some guys building these rectangular machines.  I didn’t know what they were, but they were big and yellow, had a lighted part on top, and you put money in them.  I first thought it was some kind of soda or vending machine as they were about the same size.  But a few months later, my mom and I were grocery shopping at Kroger and at the checkout lanes; they had that same machine I saw on TV!  I asked my mom if I could go look at it, and she said yes.  Turns out it was a Pac-Man machine, and my mom gave me a quarter to try it.  I was mesmerized at how you could move the little yellow character on screen, and I talked about the colorful ghosts, blue maze, and funny sound effects all the way home.  I wonder if my mom knew what kind of monster she created that fateful trip.  And that’s how I first played Pac-Man!

Ms. Pac-Man

When Pac-Man was brought to the US, Namco didn’t have an office here yet, so they licensed Pac-Man to Midway back then.  Midway made a LOT of Pac-Man games that were totally unrelated to Namco, like Jr. Pac-Man, the quiz game Professor Pac-Man, and Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man Pinball, as well as the pinball arcade hybrid Baby Pac-Man.  Ms. Pac-Man was one of those games, and is the only one that Namco seems to still recognize simply because it makes money and is really better than the original.  You can still see Ms. Pac-Man in some arcades today!  And to think it started out as a hack!  In Pac-Man Museum, Ms. Pac-Man isn’t initially included, but you can download it separately for free.  I think it should’ve been on there in the first place, but it seems that Namco wants to kind of ‘hide’ Ms. Pac-Man as of late.  I have my opinions as to why that is, but I’ll keep that to myself unless you really want to know, and if so, you can send me a message.

Super Pac-Man

This is actually the ‘true’ sequel to Pac-Man, as it was made by Namco.  Even though gameplay-wise, there are better Pac games out there, Super Pac-Man is probably my favorite Pac-Man game.  Why?  Well, because it’s so bonkers, and because I’m really good at it.  I usually try not to be boastful about my video game skills, because I know there are plenty of people who are way better than me.  But with Super Pac-Man, I can say with confidence that I could probably either beat you at it, or at least hold my own really well.  When I was a kid, the Wal-Mart near our house had a couple of arcade machines near the entrance (a lot of places did that back then).  Some of those arcade games included Pengo, SkyKid, and Victory Road.  But the game that was there the longest was Super Pac-Man.  If we were there and I was being good, my mom would usually give me a quarter to play Super Pac-Man either before or after we shopped.  Since we got a lot of groceries at that Wal-Mart, I played Super Pac-Man quite a bit and got really good at it!

Pac & Pal

This one was never actually released in the US, but it’s rumored there was a prototype called Pac-Man & Chomp Chomp that replaced Pac’s “Pal” with his dog from the 80’s cartoon show.  Pac & Pal plays a lot like Super Pac-Man, in that you must flip cards to open doors in the maze to nab the fruit.  But you have to watch out because a “Pal” can take the fruit and bring it back to the ghost’s hideout, never to be seen again.  This Pal is round and green and has a bow on her head, and her name is Miru, apparently.  There are also no power pellets. You eat things like Galaxians or Rally-X cars or trumpets and ‘shoot’ out beams or smoke or notes at the ghosts to get points temporarily.  It’s a really odd one.

Pac-Land

Namco may try and hide it, but Pac-Land is really based on the early 80’s Pac-Man cartoon show.  Has the same music and everything.  They even changed some of the graphics in the US version to make it look even more like the cartoon.  Pac-Land is a 2-D platformer, and it came out a full year before Super Mario Bros. (and looks better graphically, too).  But that’s not to say it’s better than Mario’s game.  I never really liked Pac-Land because the controls were very stiff.  And in the arcade, it had no joystick, just buttons.  They toted the button only scheme would simplify controls, but it really didn’t.  So while Super Mario Bros. may have gotten 2-D platforming right, it certainly wasn’t the first one ever.

Pac-Mania

I was pretty excited to see Pac-Mania in arcades because there hadn’t been a new Pac game since 1984, and this came out in 1987-1988.  For the time, Pac-Mania had cool 3-D isometric graphics, a catchy soundtrack, and a neat new gameplay mechanic: you could jump over the ghosts!  It’s actually one of my favorite Pac games to this day!

Pac-Attack

Initially, I was pretty excited for Pac-Attack, too, as it was the first new Pac-Man game since Pac-Mania, so that was like a five year plus timespan.  Pac-Attack was not an arcade game, but a console title for the SNES, Genesis, and handheld games at the time.  It was a Tetris-like puzzle game, but unfortunately, it wasn’t very good.  But did you know that Pac-Attack is just a reworked version of an earlier arcade Namco puzzler called Cosmo Gang: The Puzzle?  Earlier, Namco released a mechanical light gun game called Cosmo Gang where you shot at aliens who would creep from the top of the field to capture some boxes on the bottom.  If they brought all the boxes back to their spaceship, you’d lose.  I know they brought that to the US, because I remember playing it somewhere a long time ago.  They made two video games with the Cosmo Gang characters.  One was a Galaga-like game called Cosmo Gang: The Game, and the other was the aforementioned puzzler.  I don’t think those appeared in the US, though.  Cosmo Gang characters appear in other games, like Dig Dug Arrangement (arcade), and Point Blank 2.

In Pac-Man World 2, you could collect hidden tokens that would unlock classic Pac-Man games you could play, and one of them was Pac-Attack.  However, the cool thing was it was the Namco Anthology version of Pac-Attack!  On the PSOne, Namco in Japan released a few Namco Anthology titles.  They were like the Namco Museums, but featured console titles with original and updated versions of those classics.  The Pac-Man World team put the improved Namco Anthology version of Pac-Attack on Pac-Man World 2, which is a much better game than the one we’ve seen on other collections.  That was actually the coolest part of Pac-Man World 2, and why I feel the PMW team really cared about the games they made.  I wish Namco would’ve put the Namco Anthology version of Pac-Attack on Pac-Man Museum!

Pac-Man Arrangement

On the PSP there is an arcade compilation called Namco Museum Battle Collection, and it has updated versions of classics like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, etc.  And they put ‘Arrangement’ in the title.  That version of Pac-Man Arrangement is what’s on the Pac-Man Museum.  It’s OK and has bright, colorful graphics, and a few new features.  But what’s unfortunate is that they did not include the arcade Pac-Man Arrangement, which is a far superior game.  In the mid-90’s, Namco released a couple of arcade games that had classic titles with updated “Arrangement” versions.  The arcade version of Pac-Man Arrangement is awesome, and one of my favorite Pac-Man games of all time.  Pac-Man gets some new power-ups, and so do the ghosts!  If the ghosts collide with a new yellow ghost, they could merge and power-up.  Blinky would grow horns and could charge at Pac-Man, Pinky would grow rabbit ears and could jump close to where Pac-Man was, Inky would wear sunglasses and could make a mirror image of himself, and Clyde would get fat and cry more Pac-Dots!  The arcade version of Pac-Man Arrangement has made it to a few home console collections, including one Namco Museum on GameCube, PS2, and Xbox, and the Pac-Man Collection on GBA had it, too.  I wish they could’ve put it on the Pac-Man Museum as well.

Pac-Man: Championship Edition

This game was one of the main reasons why I got an Xbox 360, and it’s one of the finest Pac-Man games ever made.  It’s fairly new, so I won’t go into it too much here, since most of you reading this have probably heard about it.  If you haven’t played it yet, there are a lot of ways you can now.  The only problem I have with it on the Pac-Man Museum is that they didn’t include the DX version as well.

Pac-Man Battle Royale

I was glad to see this on the collection.  It’s actually the last arcade Pac-Man game, and came out a few years ago in arcades, so I think that’s pretty neat.  It’s a multiplayer competitive style Pac game where up to four try and eat each other as well as chomp on dots and avoid ghosts.  It looks very similar to Pac-Man Championship Edition, and in my opinion, should’ve just been a multiplayer add-on to that game.  Unfortunately, while I think it’s cool that this was actually an arcade game, it’s really not very good.  Pacing is disjointed as they stop the whole round once a winner is declared.  Pac-Man Vs. still reigns king as the best multiplayer Pac game.

Thank You for Visiting!

And that’s all the games in the Pac-Man Museum!  As I said in my main review, you can also earn stamps when you complete certain goals in each game, which is cool.  But it also unlocks characters to view in Pac-Man’s room, which is based on the crappy Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures Cartoon, which is bad.  Overall it’s a decent collection, but they could’ve gone the extra mile to add more games, like I said during the tour.  It would’ve been neat to have more console entries, like Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, and most of the games on here you can play on other collections anyway. 

At any rate, thanks for being in my tour group for the Pac-Man Museum.  Don’t forget to visit the gift shop on the way out.  Friendly Miyuki-Chan from Ordyne is waiting at the checkout to help you with your purchases!  Let me know what you thought of the tour in the comments section, and tell me if you’d like it if I really was a tour guide for a real Pac-Man Museum!  Later!  --Cary