Mickey Mouse
aka The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
Platform: Game Boy
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 5, 1989 Re-Released in 1997 in Bugs Bunny Collection (Japan Only) NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
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Thankfully, unlike the Famicom/NES review, I don’t have to consider the North American and Japanese versions of Mickey Mouse/Bugs Bunny to be separate. This time, they play identical, which means I only have to play it once! However, I’ll note that, no matter which emulator I used, the Super Game Boy version found in Bugs Bunny Collection was noticeably more sluggish and I don’t recommend trying it even if it’s an option. As for the original builds, pick your poison: Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. I went with Mickey Mouse, who is 1 for 1 so far in my Disney adventures. Oh, and something I didn’t mention in my Mickey Mousecapades review: when you open-up the cart for the game, there’s a Hidden Mickey on the circuit board. WHY WOULD YOU EVEN DO THAT?
The Game Boy version leans heavier on massive door mazes that were relatively rare on the NES port. My theory is because it looks better on the colorless Game Boy screen.
So, why give this a separate review? Because, while the enemies carry over and there are some levels that feel similar to the Famicom/NES counterpart, Crazy Castle/Mickey Mouse is much different on the Game Boy. The level count is increased from 60 to 80, and allegedly all the levels are different from the NES one. Some seem similar, notably one that has a series of left-to-right staircases, but even this is slightly modified. Oddly enough, despite having twenty more stages, I actually completed the Game Boy version in roughly the same amount of time I did the NES version: about two hours and change. Curious, right? If you take the original game’s formula and add 33% more levels, you would expect to add another thirty to forty minutes of playtime. Yet, somehow I finished in roughly the same time. That hammers home how different Crazy Castle is on the Game Boy.
And, mind you, I died A LOT more on the Game Boy, too. Things are getting weird, folks.
I wondered if maybe the levels were physically smaller, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The speed is certainly a big part of the reason. It wasn’t rare for me to fly through stages in thirty seconds or less, even late in the game. While the Game Boy Crazy Castle has similar grid based movement from the NES port, where you travel further than perhaps you’d like to just by taking a single step forward, the whole game plays much faster. Or, at least, you seem to move faster. This does factor into the gameplay, too, as enemies take the stairs slowly, while you take them very quickly. I commonly died by trying to scoot past them when I thought I had enough clearance. In fact, most of my fatalities were just the result of bad judgment of how many paces a single tap of the D-pad would take me. The issue of walking over the edge while taking stairs was even worse on the Game Boy. And, thanks to the smaller screen, the issue of having to start each stage blindly not knowing where the hearts are, or even what enemies are present, is worse.
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Yet, I sort of liked the level design better in the Game Boy version. Whether you call it Mickey Mouse or Crazy Castle, the game is much more claustrophobic this time around than it was on the NES, which makes it more exciting and intense. The close-calls are much more plentiful and work with the faster pace instead of against it. Even the lack of color doesn’t hurt at all, and I figured it would! See the pictures above? The darker shaded Big Bad Wolf is the one who can use the stairs. The lighter one can’t. Easy peasy. There’s also a bizarre special feature where you can watch replays of the stages you just beat, though I’m not sure what the point of that is. For the memory they used with that, they could have probably bumped this up to 100 levels or more. I think it speaks volumes that I’ve finished 140 levels of Crazy Castle in the last two days and the only reason I stopped is because I ran out of levels. Thankfully, I have three more of these to go. And one better known as Kid Klown. That one probably won’t be as fun. Verdict: YES!
Roger Rabbit
aka The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
Platform: Famicom Disk System
Developed by Kemco
First Released February 16, 1989 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Two straight Kemco games. Total coincidence, as I’m going in chronological order.
There’s going to be a LOT of games in the “Crazy Castle” series reviewed here over the coming days, folks. Like, there’s five more to go after this. This is the first of the franchise, released in the US with Bugs Bunny instead of Roger Rabbit because LJN owned the Roger Rabbit license in the United States. I think LJN would have been better off licensing this game, but that probably wasn’t an option. Kemco wanted to establish themselves as a player in the US market. Their North American NES lineup up to this point consisted of three games, two of which were mediocre: a port of PC mainstay Spy vs. Spy, along with the Superman NES game that’s among the worst games ever made. A third game, Desert Commander, was critically well-received but wasn’t exactly an on-trend genre. The port of graphic adventure Shadowgate would release a month after Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle came out in the US, but let’s face it: this was Kemco’s best game up to this point, and they knew it. If they were going to break through in the US, this was going to be the one that did it.
The controls are so stiff that it feels like rigor mortis has settled-in.
And I really like Roger Rabbit. It’s like an easier but more fun and exciting version of Lode Runner. You have to navigate a 2D maze and collect hearts (or carrots if you’re Bugs Bunny) while avoiding a variety of enemies. What makes the game work is the enemies have fixed-behavior and attack patterns similar to the ghosts in Pac-Man. While all but one of them will give chase to you if they end up on the same floor as you, the penguin (Daffy Duck) never uses the doors, stairs, or pipes and will keep walking until he hits a wall, then reverses direction. Judge Doom (Wile E. Coyote) and the bouncer gorilla (Yosemite Sam) also skips the doors/stairs/pipes, but they’ll directly chase you. The pink weasel (Sylvester) will walk in a straight line until they reach a stair, door, or pipe, and they’ll ALWAYS take it, though they can only move upwards, never down (except via falling off a ledge). He’ll also stop moving if he reaches a wall and you’re not moving. The blue weasel (Sylvester again) repeats the “only can go up” part, but he’ll directly chase you, like Judge Doom. Finally, the green weasel (yep, Sylvester) is a wildcard because he can’t be manipulated into following you.
If not for the controls, I think I’d rank this very high on the list of NES games I’ve played. But, man, those controls.. oof. Pretty awful.
To defend yourself, there’s a variety of cartoonish gags. There’s safes, anvils, and boxes that you can drop on enemies from higher ledges. There’s a boxing glove that acts as a projectile, and finally invisible ink, which is functionally a star in a Mario game and grants you invincibility. The combat is satisfying, but it’s the level design that carries the day. There’s sixty stages and it just never gets boring, especially when the game throws in pipe mazes or hazards like the skulls that you can’t walk into. Besides the controls, my biggest problem with Roger Rabbit is the difficulty scaling is non-existent. Hard levels will immediately be followed by several that are cakewalks. But, even cinchy stages will display some truly imaginative designs. Even ones that feel “gimmicky” for lack of a better term are a delight to explore, and grabbing that last heart always put a smile on my face.
When you think they’ve stretched the game to its creative limits, it keeps pulling out the surprises, like having entirely vertically-stacked levels. I loved Roger Rabbit. Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle? Well..
Oh, it gets frustrating. The controls are so sluggish. The game has some of the largest spaces for grid-based movement I’ve seen. This is especially frustrating when judging whether or not you’re about to walk off the edge of a platform. While it’s not fatal.. unless an enemy is below you.. you might have to redo a lot of progress if you accidentally walk too far. I also didn’t love how the scrolling was handled. While this is a close cousin to Lode Runner, one thing I like about that game is you are shown the whole level before the action starts. That’s not the case here, and a lot of the time, you have to move around blindly, not sure of where the hearts are. Oh, and sometimes the enemies feel like they’re just plain puppy-guarding areas. It’s why I was conservative with my boxing gloves, since they can only be fired a single time. Despite all the problems, Roger Rabbit is one of the most underrated games on the Famicom Disk System. I couldn’t understand why the NES version wasn’t a major hit.
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Then, I played Crazy Castle, and wow. Yea, good lord, I understand now. Besides the graphics, there is one major noticeable difference between Roger Rabbit and Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle that makes all the difference in the world. The US version has much slower enemies than the FDS original. I have no idea why Kemco made this adjustment, since it’s not like Roger Rabbit was impossibly difficult.. or difficult at all, really. Since you get a 1up after every stage AND there’s passwords that make continuing a cinch, there really was no benefit to universally nerfing the enemies like they did. I thought maybe they would speed up as you went along, but that’s not the case either. It’s completely nonsensical.
Nerfing the enemies for the US market is insane. Some games, the changes make sense. This time around, they nerfed enemies in a game that had already leaned slightly on the easy side of the puzzle genre. It’s baffling, folks. I have no answer for you, but I think the decision cost the game dearly.
The slowing down of the enemies removes the majority of the excitement from the game. The tension just isn’t there anymore. Scratching out a comfortable distance between YOU and THEM is fish in a barrel. Also, this move introduces new problems. Since Bugs still moves at the same speed and the enemies still have the same movement logic, the now arthritic Looney Tunes tend to cluster-up more, which makes the puppy-guarding situation worse. “Wait, wouldn’t that add to the difficulty?” Not really, because you can still “tempt” them away from the area, which is how I dealt with the problem if I didn’t have a boxing glove. Only now, there’s no tension in doing so. You know you’re going to outrun them. If anything, it forces you to play the game at a much, much slower pace.
I’m going to guess the odds on Roger Rabbit ever being re-released again are roughly the same as me spontaneously developing super powers. So, Kemco, if you’re listening: on the off-off-off chance you get the rights to re-release Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle ever again, PLEASE restore the original enemy speed. Don’t be stupid. Again, I mean.
It’s unfathomable. The same game with the same levels, the same combat, and the same enemies is significantly less fun because of that one brainless change that never stood to benefit anyone. I suspect we might soon see a Crazy Castle compilation with the full series released. What IP that collection will utilize I’m not entirely sure of, but I do know that the version that came out on the Famicom Disk System is one of the best 8-bit puzzlers on a Nintendo platform. The NES version was reduced to “oh yea, I remember that game” status when it should be held up as legendary. It’s a design choice so damaging it should be taught in design school. Verdict: YES! to Roger Rabbit, NO! to Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
Donald Duck aka Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Kemco First Released September 22, 1988 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The one and only time I defeated Daisy in the sack race and it wasn’t in the “compete in all events” thing. Damnit.
Donald Duck is, on the down low, a Famicom port of the Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum satire of Epyx’s “Games” series called Alternative World Games. Instead of legit Olympic events, you sack race, throw a boot (WTF?), use a pogo stick to jump over walls, balance a stack of pizzas, shove Daisy Duck off a boat (SERIOUSLY THE HELL?) or pole vault yourself over a river (Jackass: The Movie were obviously big fans of this). You can play each game individually OR you can play a full cycle of the games. I’m not remotely a fan of Epyx’s franchise, so I was dreading this going into it. My fear was founded, because like those California Games or Winter Games or Summer Games releases, the issue is THE GAMES AREN’T FUN! Which is, you know.. the object.
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For the sack race, the brutal AI makes the game borderline unplayable. The computer opponent just doesn’t seem to make mistakes. There was ONE exception in the sack race where Daisy and I kept colliding at the start of the race. Once we did, she never recovered AND kept making mistakes. I tried to replicate this, but that was the one and only time she didn’t perfectly fly out of the gates and get a major lead on me. I’ll never understand how developers back in the day couldn’t figure out that impossibly perfect AI isn’t fun. Meanwhile, in the sumo wrestling-like boat game where you have to shove her into the water, as long as I kept centering myself in the middle of the boat (you can move up and down) I couldn’t lose. It was too easy. There’s no difficulty settings, mind you. The other games barely qualify as mini-games. The boot-throwing game literally only requires you to press DOWN three or four times to build up momentum and then press A at the right moment to hurl the boot as far as you can. I was able to consistently get 10M (30ft in the US version), which seems to be the max score. I know it was a different era, but it stinks of something thrown together in a day as a +1 to the event count.
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The pizza game is perhaps the most boring idea for a video game ever made. You have to inch your way just past the starting screen to a finish line while balancing a stack of pizzas. If you move too fast, the top of the stack will topple over, but you can keep going. In fact, as far as I can tell, you literally cannot drop the bottom of the stack, so unless you just don’t cross the finish line, you can’tlose this one. But, if you want to keep your whole stack, you have to literally heel-toe your way across the damn screen. And, go figure, this was the only game that got my blood pumping, but only because I barely beat the timer with a full stack. When I finally made it across the finish line with the entire stack of pizza, with only 1.3 seconds to go, I literally cheered. Then I did it again on the Snoopy version and had over 25 seconds left because I now understood the timing and rhythm for the movement, rendering it too easy. So much more excitement.
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As far as I could tell, Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular!, the NES version of Donald Duck, is the same game with altered graphics. HOWEVER, it’s worth noting that I beat Spike (Snoopy’s cousin and the replacement for Daisy) on my second attempt and it was the only time I successfully completed the river jumping (pole vaulting) event, where you mash A to build up speed, then press and hold B to plant your pole in the water. You have to let go at the exact right moment, and that right moment is very fickle. I spent a solid fifteen minutes on the Famicom version and never once completed it. I finally did complete it on the Snoopy version, and was stunned to discover that was the whole event in its entirety. It didn’t want me to do it a second time. THAT ONE JUMP was it. Lastly, the pogo stick event lasted maybe fifteen seconds and is like hurdles.. on a pogo stick. Again, it’s just a matter of timing your jumps and it’s not fun at all. When the best of six games is literally “move as fast as you can in a slow way” (or is it the other way around?) it makes you wonder if the whole “satire against Epyx” was worth it. While I concede that I enjoyed Donald Duck/Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular! more than Epyx’s franchise, I’m not a fan of 8-bit mini game collections. To Donald Duck’s credit, it feels like it was made for little kids of the 1980s, and that’s fine. But, I think little kids of the 2020s would be as bored as I was. Verdict: NO!
Mickey Mousecapade aka Mickey Mouse: Adventures in Wonderland Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Hudson Soft First Released March 6, 1987 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Say CHEESE! While Minnie follows Mickey, there’s this weird delay to it. Also, she doesn’t take damage. At all. You can use these two quirks to your advantage if you can separate Minnie from Mickey. Here, she’s killing the first boss while Mickey has a break below her. Hazel the Witch’s bullets pass right through her, and they don’t go down to where Mickey is. Once again, leave it to women to do all the work.
In Japan, Mickey Mousecapade sends Mickey and Minnie on a journey to rescue Alice from the 1951 Disney animated film Alice in Wonderland. Well, except for level four, where Captain Hook shows up for no reason. While saving Alice is still the ultimate goal of the US port of Mickey Mousecapade, all other references to Alice and Wonderland, along with Captain Hook (always the real victim) have been removed. Why would they do that? I have a theory.. that it’s a demon. A dancing demon. No, something isn’t right there. Sorry. My theory is that the NES was marketed to boys and Alice in Wonderland is a “girl’s movie” and Capcom didn’t want boys of the 80s to think they’d get cooties playing on their beloved Nintendo Entertainment Systems. That’s it. It’s cynical, and I hate cynicism, but I think that’s the reason.
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In this platformer, you have to make your way to a boss fight in each of the five stages, all of which feel relatively different from each-other. The first and last stages play out a little like a maze, where you have to first fetch a key before you’re able to finish a level. In the first stage, you also have to locate the projectiles that you use for combat. There’s two chests in the stage, one at the beginning and one near the end, that contain stars. If you get both, Minnie will be able to cheese two of the five bosses for you, since she can’t take damage. One annoyance with Mickey Mousecapade is that enemies tend to be spongy, taking many shots to wipe out. But, this is tempered by Minnie being invulnerable. Separate her from Mickey and the combat is literally free shots. The second stage is a traditional scroll-right platformer with tons of pits. While the jumping is satisfactory, you also have to jump for two characters who aren’t in sync. If Minnie falls in a pit, you both die. Mickey presumably has a broken heart, making this gaming’s most adorable death. Of course, you won’t find it adorable. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be telling Mickey to dump the bitch.
I’m dead here. By the way, this is the Japanese version, and I think it’s harder for reasons I’ll get into.
Level three is one of those abstract “pick the right path” mazes set in a forest. The seasons change, and the trick is there’s two hidden doors that you have to shoot your projectiles at to reveal. Mickey Mousecapade is FULL of these invisible goodies, though in levels 1 and 5, they could be whammies that steal Minnie from you, forcing you to find a way to rescue her before you can finish the stage. Level four is a pirate ship that’s only an embarrassing four single-screens big. Well, they sure phoned that one in. The final level is done in the style of the first stage, but it seems designed to make it harder to keep Mickey & Minnie in sync with each other. You can’t leave any room unless you BOTH leave it, and it becomes frustrating.
They’re just not seeing eye-to-eye.
Since Mickey Mousecapade can be beaten in under an hour, and I’m a compulsive moron, I played through both versions. The graphics aren’t the only difference. You start the Japanese version with a lot less life, for one thing. That’s the only 100% certain change about the difficulty, but having played through both, it sure seemed like Minnie follows you much less closely in the Famicom version. I cruised through the second level on the NES port, but in the Japanese one, Minnie simply wasn’t hitting her jumps with me. Then, in the final level, while the NES version had annoying moments, I especially struggled with getting Minnie to be able to navigate the platforms with me on the Famicom. She’s the OG Yorda from Ico in that she just plain doesn’t follow your directions. I’m open to the possibility I’m imagining this, but it seems like the NES version might have slightly adjusted the delay between your input and Minnie doing something.
The pirate ship being a whopping FOUR SCREENS is shamefully lazy. Seriously, FOUR SCREENS? Given the fact that the fourth boss is also in the final stage, why even bother with it, especially since Captain Hook has NOTHING to do with Alice in Wonderland. If the four screens was a file size issue, dump the stage and add four more screens to one of the other levels.
In general, Mickey Mousecapade is slightly harder than I expected it to be. It’s not just the spongy enemies, but there’s lots of cheap enemy design. Meanwhile, bosses, and even mini-bosses, degenerate into fire fights where you both spam projectiles at each-other until one of you drops dead. The final level repeats the Peg Leg Pete battle from the fourth level before you face off against the big bad, which is Maleficent in the US or the Queen of Hearts in Japan. I think both versions are a bit on the janky side, and I can’t stress enough how insanely the bosses spam projectiles. Of course, having three out of five bosses be cheesable to some degree takes the edge off that.
If you find a fairy on the literal final door to the final boss, you can one shot the last boss with invincibility. Whose stupid idea was it to hide a fairy there?
But, overall, Mickey Mousecapade isn’t a bad little game. Most of Hudson Soft’s output from this era didn’t age very well. Mickey Mousecapade aged better than most, and I think the level design plays a big part in that. Sure, I was very annoyed about the pirate ship. Hell, pirate-themed levels are one of my favorite gaming tropes. But, the first, third, and fifth stages are really well done. The first and fifth especially, where I wish the whole game had been done in their style. And hey, while the combat is spongy, it’s also satisfying enough. I walked away from Mickey Mousecapade having beaten it twice in a two hour span and I never got bored. I actually wish they’d do a sequel all these years later that focused on the maze aspect, and had more creative boss design. Still, not bad for a game creeping-up on forty years of age. Verdict: YES!
Gremlins 2: The New Batch Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released October, 1990 Designed by Yoshiaki Iwata Developed by Sunsoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
From the director of Blaster Master and using a modified version of that game’s top-down engine (the same one also used in Fester’s Quest), Gremlins 2 is often cited as one of the best NES licensed games. I don’t know if I’d go that far. It took me under two hours to finish it with minimum cheating. What little rewinding I did was used to undo some frankly bullcrap jumping design. Gremlins 2’s main challenge is based around pits, spikes, and electric fences. God knows it’s not the combat. Oh, that’s in the game, but by time you reach the final stage, you’re tank-like. No, in Gremlins 2, you die via falling, frying, or electrocution. A great licensed NES game? Hell, this Gremlins isn’t as good as the Atari 5200 game that I looked at in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include.
I think this probably stood out in 1990 because it looks dang good for an NES game. TONS of flicker, though.
Playing as Gizmo, you have to navigate a series of mazes, jumping over pits and occasionally fighting enemies. Those enemies might be giant tomatoes, or rats, bats, and eventually Gremlins. Early on, it seemed like the game would be combat-focused. By the halfway point of Gremlins 2, conveyor belts and moving platforms take over for carrying the challenge. Not just conveyor belts or moving platforms, but conveyor belts and moving platforms surrounded by pits that you must hop onto and off of, usually onto another conveyor belt or moving platform surrounded by pits. Or maybe it’ll be fire instead of pits this next time. Maybe you’ll have to hop across electric fences on a moving platform while avoiding enemies and a giant swinging spiked ball. Again, I can’t stress enough: it’s the pits and environmental hazards that completely dominate Gremlins 2 by the time you reach only the second of five worlds. That might not be so bad, except that it’s the cheapest, most infuriating series of platforming sections I’ve seen in a top-down NES game.
And since there’s only so many jumping gags you can pull off with an 8-bit engine, this style of level design grows old really fast. Thankfully, the game is over very quickly, especially if you have absolutely no scruples when it comes to cheating. What irks me is how this feels nothing like a Gremlins game. Oddly enough, for a title based around creatures that multiply with water, one environmental hazard conspicuous by its absence is water. You’d think THAT would make for an interesting challenge. Avoid water, or else you hatch a Mogwai that needs to be stopped before it reaches food (I’m assuming it’s after midnight). None of that is here. Outside of cutscenes, the actual logic or lore of the movie series is completely missing. Gremlins 2 feels distinctly like a game that was meant to be something else entirely and had the graphics modified to accommodate the license. Besides the character sprites, there’s nothing specifically Gremlins-like about it.
There are Gremlins from the second movie, such as the Fruit Gremlin shown here. But again, they could have been ANYTHING. If the Atari 5200 game could include the rules of the film franchise, why couldn’t this? I mean, the 5200 game is only one of the very best on the entire console and one of the most creative uses of a movie license ever. I sorta wish they’d just remade that with new hazards and faster gameplay.
To the credit of Gremlins 2, the combat is a lot of fun. You start by just throwing tomatoes at enemies.. including larger tomatoes. I guess because there was a giant tomato in the film? Weird. When you finish each of the game worlds, you get a more powerful weapon. Now, I figured the game would handle this upgraded weapon aspect by including more powerful, spongier enemies as you went along. While it does add a new enemy or two every stage, the old ones you’ve already fought keep showing up, and your new weapons do shred them faster. Well, that was unexpected. It gives a genuine sense of progression. You can also further purchase an upgrade to your items from a shop, but once you do it the first time, you don’t seem to need to anymore. Even though the shop keeps selling the upgrades. Okay, that was weird.
I never once short on money to buy ANYTHING in the game. What was the point of that?
In fact, the whole shop system is just beyond stupid. You can only have four hearts, but like the weapon upgrade, the ability to purchase another heart will keep showing up. Also, you can only purchase one item per a visit to the shop, and the shops only show up once per level. This, despite the fact that every enemy drops currency. I just beat the damn game, and if enemies drop health refills, I never once saw it happen. They dropped pogo sticks that work like invincibility stars or flashbulbs that clear all the enemies on the screen, but by the second half of the game, they stopped dropping those, too. It’s all currency, all the time. I suppose if you avoid combat, you might not have enough money to purchase stuff, but that never even occurred to me. Why would I skip fighting the enemies? That’s the good part! The only good part, in fact!
Update: Apparently this might have something to do with the password system, since the passwords start you off with three hearts and no upgrade to that world’s weapon. Fair enough, I guess? I forgot there was a password system, but did this really need one? It’s a very short game.
The final boss, a Blaster Master-like encounter in a black void. I really was stunned that the game ended here.
So, did I like Gremlins 2? I had to think about it, and I really didn’t. I spent most of the time hoping for more combat and less jumping. It just didn’t do enough. Again, I have to go back to the fact that, by the halfway point of the game, the entire challenge is based around jumping. And by that, I mean they created mostly small, player-character-sized platforms and minimal room for error. It’s a really boring, repetitive way of creating a game, and it feels nothing like Gremlins. Just an endless series of gaps/fire pits/electrified fences paired with moving platforms and conveyor belts. It makes me wonder if the combat and sense of empowerment as you get stronger weapons that I enjoyed so much didn’t actually ruin the game. I’ve heard this called “Blaster Master with jumping” and that’s fair, but the jumping physics are hard to gauge. Especially when so much of it is based around hopping on and off moving platforms or conveyor belts.
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Besides the combat, the best thing I can say about Gremlins 2: The New Batch is it’s over quickly. I needed about ninety minutes to finish it, and I was ready for it to be over when it was done. There’s only ten stages divided into five worlds. While the graphics are dazzling for the era and the set pieces are nice, it feels like a game that was short on ideas. The first world doesn’t even have a boss fight, for god’s sake! As for the four bosses, they’re massive letdowns. I was hoping for Blaster Master-like gigantic creatures. Instead, I was able to cheese each of them without dying just by spamming my attack. At least those end with Gizmo triumphantly holding his new weapon. As opposed to the non-boss levels, which just suddenly end with the victory music playing, often when you reach a seemingly arbitrary location. As far as games I’ve given a NO! to, this would be in the upper-tier of them because the combat is fun and it plays well enough, I suppose. It’s not that there’s NO fun to be had, but I spent most of the game rolling my eyes as it regressed to the same jumping gags over and over. Gremlins 2 is one of the NES’ most overrated games. Good graphics, though! Verdict: NO!
I was a little startled when I saw the lineup for Taito Milestones. Taito was the company behind Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, and Arkanoid. What’s their first collection have? Two barely memorable “oh yea, I played that one! It was fun!” all-stars and eight other games that nobody could possibly get excited over. Compared to the Taito compilation of my childhood, Taito Legends, which had a whopping 29 games. The follow-up, Taito Legends 2, had an insane 39 games (43 if you bought every version!). This feels like the junior varsity team of classic collections.
I picked up the physical version of Taito Milestones last Christmas when it was on sale for $20. As of this writing, it’s only $11.80 on Amazon. The Milestones series uses the Arcade Archives builds of ten Taito coin-ops. Good deal, right? And, while I’ve not had great luck selecting Arcade Archives games, there’s no doubt they mostly have great emulation. The only time I can think of where I didn’t enjoy the actual technicalities of one of their releases was their port of the arcade Punch-Out!! Otherwise, Hamster knows what they’re doing.. even though they stubbornly refuse to add rewind. Logically, a set of ten games at $39.99 that uses their emulators is like getting ten Arcade Archives titles for the price of five, right? BUT, you’re not getting the full Arcade Archives packages here. The cheating-proof Hi-Score and 5 minute Caravan Modes that seem to be in every Arcade Archives release are not included with this set. So, what IS included?
EMULATION EXTRAS
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To repeat: there’s no rewind or quick save/load, so that’s annoying. There is a form of save states called “interrupt save state” that, when used, creates a save state that you have to quit the game and restart to activate. And that save state disappears when you game over. Why not just give us the option for normal, run-of-the-mill save states? What annoys me about Arcade Archives is that it has progressed very little over the last few years. Also, the save state feature they included can be used to cheat on the online leaderboards (check my review of Arcade Archives: Pinball for that) rendering those leaderboards functionally useless. Hi-Score mode and Caravan Mode in standard Arcade Archives releases end if you so much as pause the game, rendering cheating impossible. And frankly, the games included in this set could have used as much extra value as humanly possible.
The options would normally be controlled by dip switches. Here, what they are (and what’s the default setting) are clearly labeled. I appreciate that.
What you DO get is clear, detailed instructions for each game. I always appreciated that Arcade Archives has some of the most well-written instructions in the retro gaming scene. They always include photos of the items and what they do. They also include all the dip switch options for each game, and again, they’re clearly labeled. Also, this is now the only way to get Hamster’s Arcade Archives build of Elevator Action on Switch, which was delisted on the eShop (still available on PSN). Finally, there’s a variety of screen options, including being able to turn the Switch into “tate mode” and turn it on its side for a more accurate arcade experience, at least when the games used vertical monitors. For all the emulation features, I’m awarding no bonus in value and I’m not issuing any fines for the set. Call it a wash!
THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
I’m going off the standard set by Capcom Arcade Stadium 2: if the games are sold separately, the sales price for each individual game is the value for a quality game. Since all ten of these games are sold separately for $7.99, I’m rounding it up and setting a value of $8 per quality game. Taito Milestones has a standard suggested retail price of $39.99, which I’ll round-up and call $40. That makes the break even requirement 5 YES! votes. Though, keep in mind: nobody sells it for that, which is why I no longer award my Seal of Approval to classic collections. I set a value.
YES!: 4 GAMES NO!: 6 GAMES Standard Price: $39.99 Final Value: $32
How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!
Elevator Action
Qix
Halley’s Comet
Alpine Ski **TERMINATORLINE**
The FairyLand Story
Chack’n Pop
Space Seeker
Front Line
Wild Western
The Ninja Warriors
GAME REVIEWS
Alpine Ski Arcade Release: 1981 Unknown Designer
The collision detection seems accurate, which helps.
Ah, for the days of simple reflex-based coin-ops. In Alpine Ski, ski down a hill, pressing or alternately holding down the buttons to pick up speed while avoiding other skiers, trees, and rocks while scooping up points. Every time you crash, you lose ten seconds, and you keep playing until you run out of time. The game is divided into three segments, but really, the “ski slope course” and the “slalom course” are the same gameplay, with the only difference being you lose 100 points if you touch a flag in the slalom. The third segment, the ski jump, is the bonus stage. Here, you just have to time jumping at the end of the ramp, then not hit any trees using a radar. There is a novel twist: instead of reaching physical checkpoints on the levels, your time is reloaded when you reach scoring benchmarks. I’ve never seen a game like that, where the timer doesn’t just reload in intervals, but rather runs all the way out THEN reloads if you’ve earned it. So that’s something different!
Unless I missed it, there’s no “big points” like the 1,000/1,500 scores in the slalom course. You also don’t get a time penalty for hitting flags or just skipping the course.
Here’s my issue: nobody in their right mind expects a forty-year-old skiing game to hold up today, in the 2020s. The inclusion of Alpine Skiing in a Taito collection only really works if the set is aiming to be comprehensive. But, this Milestones series isn’t attempting that at all. Each release is staying firm at the ten games per set. Including a forty-year-old skiing game seems like it would just be bad for business. This is the type of game that probably should have been thrown in as a bonus +1 instead of being one of THE ten games. But, all I care about is whether or not I had fun. I found Alpine Skier to be somewhat cathartic in its simplicity. Wiggling back and forth, scooping up points wasn’t the worst use of time. I couldn’t get the hang of the bonus jump. Stuff like this is where going that extra mile and adding a rewind feature would have helped a lot, which would have allowed me to practice at it. I think it’s silly to have included this over more iconic games, but I had a mildly better time than I expected. Verdict: YES! $8 in value added to Taito Milestones
Chack’n Pop Arcade Release: April, 1984 Designed by Hiroshi Sakai and Hiroyuki Sakô
It’s really rare for these classic arcaders to have not one but TWO deal breakers that all but assure I vote NO! on the game. Chack’n Pop is one of those rare games that has two complete deal breakers. If it controlled fine, the enemies would be too annoying, and vice versa. The whole concept needs a complete overhaul.
The best thing I can say about Chack’n Pop is that it apparently led to the creation of Bubble Bobble. Of course, it’s one of those situations where it feels like they recognized one game wasn’t fun and set out to make a better game. Despite a couple enemies sharing nearly identical character sprites, this has nothing to do with Bubble Bobble. This is more like a side-scrolling Bomberman where you don’t have to eliminate ALL the enemies. Instead, the object is to cling to surfaces and eventually bomb all the cages that contain hearts that unlock each stage’s exit. The bombs sort of bounce a bit like baseballs during the Dead Ball Era. Planting one where you want it to go is a pain in the ass and never intuitive.
It took me forever to figure out you could swim in the water. I appreciate that it tried to change up the formula, but the problem with Chack’n Pop is it’s almost impossible to manipulate the enemies into the path of the explosion. It’s agonizing to see them float away from the bombs.
What kills Chack’n Pop for me is how badly done the movement is. There are times where I’ll hold UP to transfer to the ceiling, in a spot I’ve done it before, and it doesn’t work. I read the manual multiple times trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. It has something to do with whether your foot is hanging off a platform or not, I guess. But the issue was there regardless of where my feet were. I think the collision detection for the movement was just haphazardly done. I also can’t stand the combat. The enemies are the little floating whale head thingies from Bubble Bobble, but their behavior makes no sense. You have to try to bomb them, but because their behavior is apparently randomized (or possibly programmed to retreat from the bombs), they’re too hard to kill. Because your bombs take so long to explode, chances are by time they have their sights set on you, it’s too late to fight back. I hate Chack’n Pop. I’ve played it a variety of times, on a variety of platforms, and I’ve always found it to be one of Taito’s worst games. Astonishingly, it only fell to 6th place. Really tells you how terrible the bad games in this set are. Verdict: NO!
Elevator Action Arcade Release: May 23, 1983 Designed by Toshio Kono Arcade Archives release on Switch Delisted
I don’t think any classic side-view coin-op has such a satisfying ability to dodge projectiles as Elevator Action. It’s exhilarating to leap over enemy gunfire. It’s always a thrill!
I’ve already reviewed the Arcade Archives port of Elevator Action. It got a YES! before, and it’s still getting one here. I have this game design theory: the best ideas for video games only need to accomplish the bare minimum playability to work. Elevator Action is my poster child for that. While its sequels eventually improved the core gameplay, Elevator Action Returns was really bad, but it also didn’t hit that “bare minimum playability” benchmark. Meanwhile, the original still gets the job done. A forty-year old, ultra-repetitive, sluggish-controlling action game is still damn fun after celebrating its fourth decade of existence. If that doesn’t prove my theory to be correct, I don’t know what would. Now, I find myself asking if Elevator Action really only does the bare minimum? Is it possible I got that part wrong? Yea, it is.
Dropkicks work in a pinch, but few things are as fun as dropping the lights on someone. Actually, crushing them with the elevator is the best, but that’s a rarity.
Hey, I’m not too big to admit when I’m wrong. Rolling Thunder? Now THERE’S a game that does the bare minimum. That’s probably why it sucks, while a game like Elevator Action overcomes some glaring issues with controls. It’s all about the little idiosyncrasies you barely even notice. Being able to dropkick enemies isn’t as satisfying as shooting them, but if the option wasn’t there, close quarter combat would be too unpredictable and chaotic. When you shoot out the lights on the upper floors, enemies react slower to you. Moreover, Toshio Kono proved he understood the value of good gameplay by the fact that a major gameplay mechanic was cut from the game. Originally, there would be barrels that enemies would hide in. I couldn’t find a reason why it was deleted, but I suspect it might have been too cheap. I once called Elevator Action a borderline bad game. I was just plain wrong. It’s a solid action game that does one bad thing, and many more good things. Verdict: YES! $8 in Value added to Taito Milestones WINNER: Best in Set
The Fairyland Story Arcade Release: July, 1985 Directed by Masaki Ogata and Mikio Hatano Designed by Hiroshi Tsujino
I figured Taito knew how to make a novel, exciting single-screened action game. And they do, but that doesn’t mean every recipe is a winner.
If you were hoping for a signature Bubble Bobble-like “jump around and exterminate the baddies” experience, keep hoping. The FairyLand Story actually predates Bubble Bobble by nearly a full year. That explains why it feels like a proof of concept that hasn’t figured out how to make the whole extermination aspect fun. Here, you play as a witch who transforms enemies into.. uh.. cake? Why cake? You don’t even eat it, either! You can then destroy the cake by continuously shooting it with your magic, pushing it off a high enough ledge, or having an enemy land on it. Is it fun? Not at all.
Some of the level design is so cheap that you could die a second after a stage begins. It’s not uncommon, actually.
I get the distinct impression that Taito understood they were onto something with the idea, but that they created some of the dullest combat mechanics in gaming history. It’s just not a fun way to defeat enemies. Occasionally, a worm pops out that might eat you, but it might also eat the enemies too. I think that is what the game should have been. Turning baddies into food that other baddies eat. Maybe a little macabre, but hey, so am I. However, the combat isn’t the only problem. Level design ranges from dull to annoying, with some levels having too high of barriers to cross over, forcing levels to end when the game declares a stalemate and moves you automatically to the next round. I’ve never been impressed with a game that’s so sloppy it has to give you a pity advancement. The FairyLand Story is an action-free action game, and it’s a total snoozer. Verdict: NO!
Front Line Arcade Release: November 10, 1982 Designed by Tetsuya Sasaki
CONTROLS ALTERED FROM ARCADE ORIGINAL
I will never complain about Commando being hard again.
If Front Line wasn’t impossible, it might be a decent little game. This beat titles like Ikari Warriors or Commando to the market by several years, and the arcade version even had a dial to aim your gun, something many SNK games would later copy. Unfortunately, Front Line is so prohibitively difficult that I couldn’t make any progress. That’s not an exaggeration: I COULD NOT MAKE PROGRESS! Front Line isn’t my first rodeo. While I’m nowhere near a professional caliber gamer, I’m not too shabby, either. But I couldn’t even get past the first stage of Front Line, and I spent a whole day trying.
This was the sole time I lasted more than a second in the “big tank.” Which looks more like a Dalek with a case of the blues.
Like so many crap games, fans will say you need to “get to the good stuff.” In this case, the good stuff is being able to hop into tanks. Tanks where it’s still one shot and you’re dead. The thing is, when you die at the point where you reach the tanks, you respawn without a tank you can climb into near you, surrounded by enemy tanks. You might be able to take out one of them with a grenade, but the others move faster than you and dodge your grandees easily. So, once you that first life in the area with the tanks, you’re toast. For what it’s worth, I thought the dual-stick controls Hamster implemented worked better than the arcade dial. However, Front Line wasn’t even trying to be fun. One of those games so impossible it’s practically a quarter-shakedown scam. Sadly, this won’t be the last such game in this set. Verdict: NO!
Halley’s Comet Arcade Release: January, 1986 Designed by Fukio Mitsuji
I got the power! Until I didn’t. Then, not so much power as I had a pile of broken ships.
In my first round of playing Halley’s Comet, I almost instantly became an unstoppable tank that was shredding through enemies with ease. It was quite empowering, but kind of awesome too. “Hey! This ain’t too shabby. Why isn’t this a more popular game? I’d literally never even heard of it before I started this set!” And then a wayward bullet blew me up, and my tank days were over. A few seconds later, so was my game. Yea, Halley’s Comet is one of those shmups where, when you lose your power-ups, the game doesn’t really feed you a chance at recovery and you’re pretty well screwed. Also, I now totally understand why other, better shmups give you a SPEED-UP item almost immediately.
And of course there’s no continues. Taito hadn’t yet figured out that players are more likely to keep plugging quarters into a game they suck if they’re allowed to keep sucking on their own terms. I imagine a big reason why it had no staying power is because when a game turns on a dime, like Halley’s Comet does, players are inside an arcade full of other titles that don’t feel like they just pull the rug out from underneath you.
The main problem is just don’t move fast enough to dodge all the crap Halley’s Comet throws at you. Since enemies (1) move faster than you (2) will hook right into you (3) completely fill the screen and (4) have some of the least visible bullets in the genre, when you lose that first, presumably most powerful life, the rest of the lives are certain to not be long for this world. When my GAME OVERS happened, they happened very quickly. While it lasts, Halley’s Comet is a fine generic shmup, I suppose. Even getting my ass kicked, I kept coming back, and enjoyed those early lives where my firepower could fill the screen. It’s not a total wash. But, again, I can’t help but feel this would have been a nicer game to have as part of a more comprehensive collection, like the Taito Legends games had been back in the day. Verdict: YES! $8 in Value added to Taito Milestones
The Ninja Warriors Arcade Release: “Late” 1987 Directed by Masaki Ogata Designed by Hiroshi Tsujino and Yukiwo Ishikawa
What was even the point of having a triple-wide screen?
I have never seen the likes of Ninja Warriors. I mean, I have seen games with this play style. It’s a shallow rip-off of Kung Fu Master or Shinobi, only with the gimmick of having a triple-wide screen. The original arcade cabinet used mirrors so you couldn’t see it was really using three monitors instead of a single long one. Cool idea, but the gameplay is as lifeless and shallow as any I can remember. You walk right at a pace where you can practically feel yourself being lapped by snails and slice any enemy that walks by you, or throw your progressive less effective throwing stars at them. After you walk far enough, a boss shows up. The OOMPH is non-existent and the combat is terrible. Even if what happened to me in the second stage hadn’t happened, the Ninja Warriors would have been one of the most boring games I’ve done so far. Then, IT HAPPENED! What happened? The thing that compelled me to say “I have never seen the likes of Ninja Warriors.”
“You want to keep playing this game? Well, you haven’t fed me quarters in almost a minute, since the first boss spam attacked you. Give me more quarters. Oh, you still have health. BOOM, now you don’t. More quarters, please!”
That is not hyperbole, because I’ve never seen anything like this: at the start of the second level, after you kill a small handful of baddies, you just blow you up from a tank that’s off-screen. Mind you, the screen is TRIPLE WIDE and you still can’t see the tank, and you can’t even see its projectiles it fires at you. Just BOOM, dead, pony-up more quarters, bitch! I legitimately laughed. It was just shameless about it. So flagrant. It then pulls the same crap again at the end of the stage. This sat in arcades and cost real quarters. Given the fact that an off-screen enemy shoots invisible projectiles that lead to a GAME OVER, I have to say that Ninja Warriors, as an arcade experience, is a scam. Just dying like that, from an off-screen enemy, with invisible projectiles? That’s a shakedown for quarters. Look, it’s not like Ninja Warriors was getting a YES! anyway. At its very, very best, it’s boring. But hell, I’ve dealt with boring games before. If I can’t deal with boredom, I might as well quit. What astonishes me is the game bored me to death AND THEN went that extra mile towards becoming one of the worst video games I’ve ever played. The determination to excel at being crappy is remarkable. Verdict: NO!
And it wasn’t just the Taito Milestones build where I couldn’t see the projectiles.
Qix Arcade Release: October, 1981 Designed by Randy Pfeiffer and Sandy Pfeiffer
Even Nintendo wanted in on the action. The Game Boy port had a cameo from Mario in it!
Ah, Qix. Good ‘ole, reliable, dependable, durable Qix. Somehow both relaxing and tranquil while also lending itself to white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat excitement. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept: you have a blank canvas with an evil screensaver bouncing around. The object is to leave the border and draw a line through the playfield. When you reach another border, the game fills in the area that doesn’t contain the “Qix” which is that aforementioned evil screensaver. You can either use a blue line, which is much faster and much lower scoring, or you can go for broke with the slower orange line and try to pile up points. The bigger the boxes you draw, the more points you score. When 75% of the playfield is covered, you move onto the next stage and score a bonus for every percentage point you go over. The Qix has no attack pattern and should not be mistaken for a chaser. It is just totally random in its movement. Less random are the fuses that crawl around the border, preventing you from lingering too long. It’s a simple premise, and it’s been copied for four decades now for a reason: it’s crazy fun.
Once you reach level three, the dynamic changes. There’s two QIX sticks, and if you can manage to complete ANY line between them, you win. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I only managed to do it once.
The funny thing is, few games have been ripped-off as much as Qix, and yet, the original might be the hardest version to this day. Like so many other Taito arcade experiences from the 1980s, the biggest issue with Qix is it’s too damn difficult. Even on the EASY settings, the Qix Stick becomes too fast on the second level. Boldness? Hah. I feel like every big box I completed from level two onward happened because the Qix didn’t bounce my way. Sheer dumb luck. However, I’m still grateful that Qix exists. If anyone thinks I’m some kind of soft ass who can’t take a beating and whines too much about difficult games, look no further than Qix. I suck at it. I played this for hours and rarely even made it to the double Qix levels. And yet, I couldn’t put it down. Maybe the reason why this version.. specifically THIS version.. holds up to the test of time is that tough-as-nails gameplay, which makes those moments where you cut the screen in half SO satisfying. I love this one, folks. Verdict: YES! $8 in Value added to Taito Milestones
Space Seeker Arcade Release: October, 1981 Unknown Designer
You can only shoot so high and so low in the first person mode. Naturally, the enemies will almost immediately drift below your range. This really is awful.
Combining a flagrant-yet-bad rip-off of Konami’s Scramble (which released seven months before this) with a flagrant-yet-bad rip-off of Atari’s Star Raiders, Space Seeker is a game that has no identity of its own. You’re given a world map and have to slowly crawl the cursor to one of three bases, trying to avoid the red dots. If you make contact with one of those dots, you enter the Star Raiders-like first person shooting sequence. The enemies don’t shoot at you and instead just try to suicide-bomb your guns. It makes literally no sense that it’s your guns you have to stop them from flying into. IT’S FIRST PERSON! Wouldn’t flying into literally any part of the ship do the trick? Either way, there’s no crosshairs, which makes aiming tough enough, but the upward and downward movement feels unresponsive and sluggish. Some rounds I only lasted literally a second or two before the first batch of enemies dived into my guns.
The missiles come in massive clusters, and to the game’s credit, if your timing is accurate and your aiming is true, you can wipe out all of them. Or fly into a mountain trying. I usually flew into a mountain. Unfortunately, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t there to chop it down with the edge of his hand.
Assuming you don’t die on the map itself and reach a base, Space Seeker becomes a side-scrolling shmup where clusters of missiles attack in curvy or circular patterns. Fly into the various jaggy mountains? You die. Fair enough. Fly into the clouds? Also death. Well, obviously. After all, being a ship capable of interstellar travel, condensed moisture would be lethal to you. On the plus side, the stages only have X amount of missiles, so if you keep returning to the same base, eventually you’ll get what’s essentially a free pass to that base’s goal, which ends in a speed tunnel that you can fly through for bonus points. So, there’s three play styles in one game, which yes, was ambitious for 1981, and I always admire ambition. But, forty-year-old ambition isn’t worth much today. Hell, judging by the fact that people who were around for arcades during the time haven’t heard of Space Seeker either, it doesn’t seem to have had contemporary value, either. Verdict: NO!
Wild Western Arcade Release: May, 1982 Unknown Designer
CONTROLS ALTERED FROM ARCADE ORIGINAL
The Meh Train Robbery doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Wild Western takes the rotary controls from Front Line and applies them to a game where you bobble back and forth on horseback shooting train robbers. The train is part of the playfield and bullets ricochet off it. That I was able to pull off, successfully angling bullets off the train and onto the baddies. It wasn’t remotely satisfying, but hey, it’s something. What I couldn’t do regularly was hop onto the train when the bandits boarded it. I kept.. well.. dying when my horse brained itself on it. When you clear the enemies out, you do the worst bonus stage I’ve ever played then start another stage. Unlike Front Line, I didn’t think the controls carried over well to the home port, and frankly, I don’t think Wild Western ever had potential as even a decent game. It’s actually stunning how little game is here, though at least the coin-op had the attraction of a novelty controller. That wasn’t part of the home version. Many of my lives in Wild Western lasted as long as it took for the enemy to fire their first bullet. As the final game in this set, Wild Western hammers home that Taito Milestones 1 is the collection of games not good enough to buy alone. Verdict: NO!
Time for Volume 2. To make this quick, everything I said about Volume 1 applies here. I’m fining Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 $5 in Value for poor implementation of rewinding/save states and lack of flexibility in the options. There’s no button mapping. There’s no quick save/quick load. As for the presentation, it’s exactly the same as Volume 1. That sucks, because the games of Volume 2 are so much more complicated. Mappy-Land, Legacy of the Wizard, and Mendel Palace are loaded with items and relatively complex gameplay concepts. Yet, for a game like Legacy of the Wizard, these are the instructions players are given in their entirety:
Brought to you by AT&T because they phoned this shit in.
That’s why I’m once again fining the set $5 in value for overall lazy presentation. It should be more due to the complexity of some of the games, but I’m trying to be consistent over here. I guess they expected players to open StrategyWiki or GameFAQs. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they’ll ever do another set this lazy ever again. 2020 was before prestige releases like TMNT: Cowabunga Collection and Atari 50 set the new standard.
Most of these games were not included in Evercade, but when they were, I also played their versions.
THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 is priced at $19.99, which we’ll round-up and call $20. The value for a quality NES game is set to $5, and the set earned $10 in fines. Therefore, it needs to equal $30 in value, or score six YES! verdicts. If you don’t care about the presentation or emulation extras, making up $20 in value would mean the game is worth the standard MSRP. However, the final total was:
YES!: 3 games totaling $15 in value. NO!: 8 games. Fines: $10 in Value Price: $19.99 Final Value: $5
Ouch. Namco Museum Archives is the worst collection I’ve given a full Definitive Review for yet. It’s worse than Dragon’s Lair Trilogy, and that’s saying something. However, there is a small consolation prize: for the entire Namco Archives series, or at least the ones we got in the United States, three of the top five games were in Volume 2. If you can find the collection for $5, which it often goes on sale for, it really is worth it just for Mendel Palace, and whatever other fun you have is a bonus.
FINAL RANKINGS
How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!
Mendel Palace
Mappy-Land
Gaplus **TERMINATORLINE**
Dig Dug II
Legacy of the Wizard
Super Xevious: Gamp No Nazo
Galaga
Battle City
Dragon Buster II
Rolling Thunder
Pac-Land
GAME REVIEWS
SPECIAL NOTE: For each game that’s a port of an arcade title, which most of these games are, I included a slideshow comparing the Famicom/NES port to the arcade original. The arcade games are NOT included in Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 or Vol 2.
Galaga
First Released February 15, 1985
Unknown Director (Haruhisa Udagawa?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Volume 2
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I’ve never been a very big fan of Galaga. Of the eleven games in this set, this is one I dreaded doing the most, and since a Xevious game is coming up, that’s saying something. Another “you had to be there” type of game where the evolutionary steps it took could only be fully appreciated if they were the latest step. Having said that, I’d much rather play this than Galaxian. Enemies are smarter. The gameplay is more intense. This time around, enemies aren’t already in their marching formation at the start. They majestically fly onto the screen, and after a couple rounds, they’ll start bombing you while they’re at it. It leads to Galaga being one of the fastest-paced Space Invaders coattail riders. And of course, there’s the whole capture-a-ship/double-ship mechanic that I’m sure arcade owners loved.
They prefer to be called conjoined twins.
The “leader” ships at the top have the ability to activate tractor beams. If they ensnare you in the beams, you either shoot your way out (your bullets will fly in all directions as you spin) or you get captured and they carry your ship around like a concubine. If you have no lives left at this point, it’s game over. But, if you shoot the alien that snags your old ship, it rejoins you and you get two ships that you move side-by-side for double the firepower. Of course, this also means you have double the surface area to dodge their bullets, or hell, the aliens might just dive right into you. To Galaga’s credit, the whole thing, from releasing your captured ship to shredding enemies with the double ship is hugely satisfying AND it’s peak risk/reward gameplay. But, it gets old quickly.
I really do enjoy the shot percentage wrap-up at the end of each game. Wish this was a more common feature.
As far as the port goes, it seems true to the arcade game, at least in terms of gameplay. You seem to move a little faster, but like Mappy before it in Volume 1, that might be an illusion based on the dimensions. The sky has a lot less stars on the NES, which kind of sticks out when you play the arcade game. There’s a lot less frames of animation for the enemies, which didn’t stand out to me until I allowed the enemies to fully enter the screen and begin to “pulse” collectively. A few other enemies have less detailed sprites. Otherwise, I think fans of Galaga in the 1980s would have adored this port. Today? The arcade game is about as common as Pac-Man in Namco collections, so this only has value for the sake of completion. Did I have fun? Well, not really. I did force myself to legitimately unlock the “clear stage 19” achievement without using rewind or save states. It took me three hours to get that good, and while I wasn’t miserable, I found that Galaga just isn’t as deep or replayable as Pac-Man, King & Balloon, or others from this era. Verdict: NO!
Battle City
First Released September 9, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Ryōichi Ōkubo, Takefumi Hyodo, & Junko Ozawa
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Battle City never officially came out in America, despite the NES being scorching hot and basically all third party software selling like hot cakes. Yet, of the hundreds of Famicom exclusives, Battle City is probably the most commonly played among American gamers. Why’s that? When I first played Battle City years ago, I learned that many of my older readers were introduced to it via bootleg NES “multicarts.” It was the strangest case of “I REMEMBER THAT!” I’ve ever experienced since I started exploring old games. Apparently Battle City was quite the staple of the Nintendo pirate scene. I got quite the chuckle out of this, because Battle City is so boring that finding it on a bootlegged 100-in-1 cart you got at a flea market feels like fitting punishment.
Yea, I’d rather play Mappy too. These cutesy “concept maps” that spam the screen with bricks are the worst because you have to blast a path just to engage in the enemies. The level design is very lacking.
I mean, it’s not horrible playing or anything like that. It’s just very boring. Battle City is an update to Namco’s semi-popular 1980 coin-op Tank Battalion. Battle City hit the Famicom in 1985, and like many co-op NES games from that era, the home version was lazily converted into a coin-op for Nintendo’s Vs. System line for arcades. Five years later, another update, Tank Force, hit arcades. It was so popular that it didn’t make its Namco Museum debut until 2017. It’s on the Nintendo Switch version of Museum. I might enjoy that version a lot more, since it added plenty of guns and upped the speed a bit. Battle City’s problem is that it created this seemingly fun premise, but the actual gameplay isn’t optimized for the formula.
In my first attempt at co-op, I forgot to mention to my father that the little eagle at the bottom was our base and the object was to defend it. “Oooh, item!” and that game was over.
The object of the game is to kill twenty tanks in every stage. Some of the tanks move faster, and others take multiple shots to kill. The combat is nice and blowing up tanks is satisfying enough. Hypothetically, Battle City should be based around defending the base. If a single bullet hits your base, it’s game over regardless of how many lives you have left. But, for the most part, enemies seem to rarely take notice of the base. They’ll aimlessly wander around, firing blindly. Both your bullets and enemy bullets break the brick walls, and if you collect enough power-up stars, you can even break the steel walls. It sounds great, and in my limited time with Tank Force, I found that the formula can work. But, it doesn’t work in Battle City because the levels weren’t created to force you to defend the base, or to peek around corners, fire a shot, and then take cover. Most of the levels feel like they drew random shapes with no gameplay logic behind them. You’ll spend a lot of time just firing through bricks just to reach the enemies and engage them. You have to, since the enemies don’t seem hardwired to attack you or your base.
There’s also a create-a-level mode, if you’re into that sort of thing. This is the best version of my mascot, Sweetie, that I could make. I’m really not very artistic. Looks kind of like Lolo, really.
Yea, that’s the really weird part. Enemies seldom chase you OR make a beeline for your base. They just wander around aimlessly for the most part. If there’s any Pac-Man-like invisible logic to their strategy, I couldn’t spot it. Consequently, there’s not enough sense of tension. It’s not that there’s no excitement. You have a tiny little brick barrier around your own base, and when that becomes exposed, Battle City finally finds its thrills. Your bullets can intercept the enemy bullets. I literally cheered when I perfectly timed one of my shots from across the far left side of the screen to catch what would have been the fatal shot on my base that traveled the full length from the top of the screen. It was so rewarding! Of course, the joy was short-lived, as the enemy who shot that bullet spotted a butterfly or something and wandered off instead of being like “hey, look! Her base is wide-open! We can win!” And that’s why Battle City is boring. Enemies don’t feel like they’re playing to win. Battle City is proof positive a good concept isn’t enough. It’s all about the execution. Verdict: NO!
Pac-Land
First Released November 21, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi
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In Pac-Land, you don’t move with the directional pad. Like in some versions of the arcade game, you have to press and hold down face buttons to move and tap them to move faster. I guess they wanted to be “true to the coin-op” and ignored the fact that the NES/Famicom was optimized to play Donkey Kong, and therefore was ideal for all platformers. Pac-Land did debut before Super Mario Bros. and, according to legend, the control scheme was created to allow Bally Midway to convert their unsold/returned Professor Pac-Man cabinets into a more desirable game. In this case, a Pac-Man game based on the hit Saturday Morning cartoon series that Hanna-Barbera produced. As a trailblazer in the platform genre, they had no clue what they were doing when they made the arcade game. How DO you turn a carton based on a video game into a game.. but like, a different type of game? FAIR ENOUGH!
Do you know what’s really funny about the Pac-Man TV series? I was born in 1989, over six-and-a-half years after the Pac-Man TV series aired a Christmas special on Prime Time on ABC. As recent as my childhood, that special would still air around Christmas time. I can’t exactly remember when I saw it, but I’m almost certain it aired on one of the main networks. I do very clearly remember watching it on TV as a little kid.
There’s zero excuse why the NES version kept the horrible, unintuitive control scheme. On a game console where every other game had you pressing a d-pad, Namco stuck like glue to the asinine controls of the arcade version. You have to wonder if they saw Super Mario Bros. and were like “yea, that B-running was a good idea. How come we didn’t think of that? Maybe we need even more brain damage than we already had?” and moved on from sniffing glue to smashing their own heads into concrete blocks while giggling dementedly. It’s even harder than just pressing A and B because the movement physics are sluggish and the act of changing direction is the stuff of video nightmares. Imagine if Super Mario Bros. had controlled the way Pac-Land did. The literal exact same game, with the same maps and same secrets, but with movement mapped to A and B. Where running requires players to tap buttons, and jumping was pressing ANY direction on the D-Pad. Simply put, the NES would not have blown-up, and history would have played out differently. It would have been unplayable. It’s a mental exercise that hammers home what a colossal mistake the control scheme of Pac-Land is. It beat Super Mario to the market! Pac-Land should be remembered as a classic and THE game that put platforming on the map, but it’s not. And it’s because of the controls, in my opinion.
In a later stage, you have to jump over some of the most massive bodies of water seen in a platformer. The way you do this is you have to hop on a springboard, then hop a second time, then tap the movement buttons to keep yourself going to clear the English Channel-sized pool you’re gliding over. As if that’s not ridiculous enough, they usually place a ghost or two right on top of the springboard. Do you know what’s fun about Pac-Land? NOTHING!
And mind you, this is a game where most of the levels are moving straight and hopping over a block or two. Pits or other “advanced” platforms are relatively rare. The game is broken up into “trips” where you have to make your way to a fairy, then walk back to your house. On the way back, you have an infinite double-jump. Like the rest of the control scheme, it’s not fun to use. The main obstacles are the ghosts that you have to either dodge or hop-on. The hopping-on part doesn’t kill you immediately, but if they rise up too high, you’ll die via what I have to assume is altitude sickness. There are power pellets, but there’s nowhere near enough of them. If you want to maximize them, you sort of have to walk back and forth to lure the ghosts on the screen. There’s also tons of secret items you get by pushing the blocks, where they’re shaped like a cactus or a fire hydrant. I would have been totally down for exploring, but the game runs on an absurdly fast timer. I hate it when games do that: encourage exploration and then punish you for exploring. After timing out twice, I couldn’t be bothered to keep trying.
Some will argue that the game would be too easy if it had normal controls. That is the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard, since this is obviously a chicken and egg situation. They clearly built the levels around the control scheme. That’s why enemies swamp you to add to the challenge of.. hopping over a brick as big as you are. Yea. If the designers had instead built Pac-Land to control with a joystick and a jump button, it would have freed them to be a lot more creative than they were. THERE IS SOME CREATIVITY HERE, so it’s not like the game is completely bankrupt of cleverness.
As a reminder, Namco Museum Archives has no button remapping. Unlike ports to other platforms, or the Pac-Land that’s included in other editions of Namco Museum, you’re stuck with the button-tapping control scheme here. For that reason, Pac-Land is among the very worst NES/Famicom games I’ve had the displeasure to experience. Fans of the port will typically point out two things. (1) At the time this was developed, the genre was brand new, and Pac-Land was one of THE games that established what a side-scrolling platform game should play like, especially when it came to hidden secrets. I’ll grant you that. (2) Techniques that would expand the capabilities and file size of the NES hadn’t been developed yet, and it was impressive how much they squeezed into this tiny file size. Again, touché. Pac-Land is only 41KB of data. The concessions are evident, too. I can’t imagine how disappointed someone who played the cartoonish arcade original must have been when they booted this up for the first time. It’s one of the most ugly games by a major developer I’ve encountered. But, if you were a HUGE fan of the arcade game, I bet you’d have been really happy with this. In 1985. Assuming you hadn’t played Super Mario Bros. yet. But, this was always fated to age worse than just about any game from the decade of the 80s. I hate Pac-Land. Verdict: NO!
Dig Dug II
First Released April 18, 1986
Unknown Director (Hiroki Aoyagi?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Volume 2
Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription
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Dig Dug has taken his crimes against nature to a whole new level. Not content to just impale helpless goggle-people and dragons with a harpoon and use compressed air to burst the insides out of them, he’s taken to destroying entire lush, tropical islands. The logic of Dig Dug II is absolutely f’n bonkers. “This remote island is infested, and I have the means to get rid of the infestation without harming the local ecosystem. BUT, wouldn’t it be fun if, instead, I harmed the ecosystem? By “harm” I of course mean completely destroy the ecosystem? Technically, that would do the job! That way, instead of using compressed air to exterminate helpless creatures, I can instead drown them! The cruelest of all deaths! I better stop now! I can only get so hard!” Dig Dug is a sadist, people. There can be no doubt about this. He’s completely unhinged, off-his-rocker, and a full-fledged psychopath. People think he should be in Smash Bros? Wrong fighting game. He was tailor-made for Mortal Kombat!
The sole credit I’ll give to the NES version of Dig Dug II is the designers recognized that the island destruction was the fun part. In the forty levels they added to the original arcade’s thirty-two, they built stages around the drilling, something that isn’t as common near the end of the arcade game’s stages.
Dig Dug II retains the original game’s harpoon mechanics, including the ability to more quickly burst enemies by throwing it repeatedly instead of holding the button down. The key difference is there’s no tunneling, which means enemies can walk freely. The hook this time is you can use a drill along pressure points that’ll create cracks on the surface. If the cracks completely encompass an area and connect with other cracks, the section with the least amount of land will collapse into the water. Any enemies on that land will drown for extra points. There’s only so many pressure points in the stages, and not every stage lends itself to the destroy-the-Earth gameplay. Admittedly, it’s fun and different. Enemies will not physically walk over the cracks and instead use their “turn into faces and teleport” mechanic. The fun in Dig Dug II is wrangling as many enemies as possible into an area before collapsing it into the sea.
I finished all 72 stages, and I only had to cheat one single time, so I’m kinda proud of myself. It’s actually not that hard once you remember that the dragons can’t fire upward, so staying above them helps. The other trick is to zig-zag back and forth when enemies are closing in on you. I could have the enemies right on top of me and still scratch-out enough distance to take them out using the autofire on the harpoon.
Dig Dug II on the Famicom/NES has more than double stages that the arcade game has, jumping from 32 to 72. Unlike many games that bulk-up the level count, the extra levels in the NES port of Dig Dug II are some of the best in the game. They’re almost all based around including tons of island-destruction opportunities. THAT’S THE GOOD STUFF! Props to the team behind this for recognizing that. But, while that’s impressive, the NES game is so sluggish compared to the coin-op version. This is especially noticeable when you use the game’s primary method of attack. In arcades, the collapsing happens so much faster. The whole game is faster paced, with quicker, more accurate movement. Since the enemies can move about freely and swarm you quickly, having responsive controls is a must. The arcade version? It nails it.
This might genuinely be the closest any retro game I’ve reviewed yet has come to straddling YES!/NO! line.
In comparison, the NES feels unresponsive, much slower, and a lot less exciting. However, even within those limitations, I managed to find a teeny tiny bit of fun. Drowning the enemies in the sea always puts a smile on my face. No, I’m not a psychopath. You are. Shut up. I did find it highly annoying that the levels didn’t take more advantage of the drilling component. I also have no clue what they were thinking when they chose to stick so close to the original Dig Dug by only having two varieties of enemies. It’s so obviously doomed to run out of steam before it runs out of levels. The Fygars (the little dragons) not being able to shoot upward makes them absurdly clockable. Why not add a third variety of enemy that shoots its fire only up and down? It’s insane to think that adding a single enemy type would have dramatically changed the game, but it would have probably saved Dig Dug II. I think I’d be inclined to give the arcade version a YES! because I enjoyed the much faster and crisper action. The slower NES version? Even at its best, it’s too slow and too boring. An otherwise solid port that just didn’t bring the excitement home. I would like to see this get a remake with more enemies, though. Verdict: NO!
Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo
First Released September 19, 1986
Famicom Exclusive
Directed (?) by Haruhisa Udagawa
They recycled the original engine from the NES Xevious for this. I was dreading this one quite a lot. It turns out, I should have been anxious for completely different reasons than simply not liking the original at all.
This is not an NES port of Super Xevious, the 1984 enhanced version of the original coin-op classic. No, folks, this isn’t what you think it is at all. It might actually be the most crazy idea for a shmup I’ve ever seen in my life. Get this: Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo (Mystery of Gamp) takes what sure seems like the exact same engine of the original NES port of Xevious, then combines it with the abstract “puzzle” design of Tower of Druaga. Yes, really! Each of the game’s areas has a completely unlabeled victory condition that you have to suss out, and the level will loop until you meet that condition. For example, in the first stage, there’s clouds. You have to fly into the correct part of one of the clouds to defeat the stage. In other stages, you might have to clear out enemies, bomb all ground based targets, take out the giant boss-like enemies, become trapped by specific enemies, etc, etc.
When this thing spams bullets, it REALLY spams bullets. I had to replay this several times just to figure out which order to kill the things where surviving even the first volley of enemy shots was survivable. I can’t imagine figuring that out AND having a game over hanging over me.
Well, points for originality, I guess, as well as points for adding power-ups. The power-ups aren’t AMAZING or anything, but the one that increases the blast radius of your bombs is much appreciated. There’s further twists too, as some stages take the bombs away from you, while others take your main gun away. Despite my general distaste for abstraction design, I found myself really enjoying this take on Xevious. I even tried playing it straight, but there’s a very serious problem with the game. If you take too long, which really isn’t all that long.. like more than two complete circuits through a level, the game punishes you for it by spamming the screen with bullets. Eventually, it’ll produce so many that you can’t survive. I had to give up on exploration and “playing it straight” and move onto using StrategyWiki, and that took a lot of fun out of it.
I actually enjoyed the graphics this go around. Which is weird since it’s the same engine as before.
Even without the unstated time limit, the difficulty becomes beyond the pale in later stages. It’s not even what I’d call a “bullet hell” because the gag with those games is you can squeeze your way through bullets. In Gamp, I found myself in several situations where I’m almost certain I couldn’t have survived no matter what I did once the enemy had fired its guns. The level design seems almost entirely based on random chance of picking which side of the screen to shoot enemies at. Normally, I hate it in shmups where you can collect so many speed-ups that you have to feather the D-pad like you’re giving CPR to a ladybug just to maneuver. I would have KILLED for a speed-up in GAMP No Nazo. The overwhelming majority of my deaths were the result of being on the wrong side of the screen, by pure random chance. I can’t imagine very many people ever took the time to get good enough at this to finish it. It’s not merely overwhelming. Oh no. The odds are next to impossible, and as a result, it’s just not fun.
I actually did finish this Xevious, a first in the franchise for me. I’d say “thank god this is over” but I imagine I’ll be encountering this series again in the not too distant future.
At first, I was wondering why Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo was critically panned and a money loser for Namco, because I was genuinely having a really good time. Then the game decided I was taking too much time having that good time and punished me for doing the object of the game: exploring. What an asinine design choice. Seriously, it’s not like this was a f’n arcade game. Well, actually it sort of was. Like many early NES titles, an arcade port was created for the Nintendo Vs. System that’s essentially an NES you stick coins in. I’ve encountered many of these Vs. games, and Vs. Super Xevious is probably the closest to being identical to the home version I’ve played in terms of graphics and gameplay. Suddenly, the fateful decision to penalize players makes sense. It’s to bounce people off the coin-op who clear out stages but can’t figure out how to activate the next level. A choice that completely ruins the game. I hope it was worth it. Judging by the fact that GAMP’s reputation is being one of Namco’s all-time failures, it wasn’t. Then again, even if you know what you’re doing, the screen being spammed with enemies and their bullets, while using one of the least maneuverable ships in the genre, sapped any remaining fun out of it. It’s still probably the most fun I’ve had playing a Xevious game, but that’s like a quadruple amputee saying the time they had an ingrown toenail cut out was their most pleasant removal of a body part. Verdict: NO!
Mappy-Land
First Released November 26, 1986
Developed by Tose
Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription
After starting with five NO!s, Volume 2 finally has a C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!
I’ve never played a platformer that alternates from all-timer to unplayable nightmare for one stage and one stage only quite like Mappy-Land. Then again, Mappy-Land isn’t exactly a platformer, at least in the Super Mario sense. This could have been named Mappy 2, since the same basic concept is at play: a maze chase from a side angle where you avoid the same two types of cat pursuers from the arcade original. The object is to collect all the scattered items while using trampolines to quickly scale different floors of structures that are wider than the screen. Mappy-Land builds upon the original’s premise by removing the doors and instead giving players a wider variety of comical attacks that are scattered around the stages. Shooting the cats with cannons. Kicking them using a zip line. The “combat” of Mappy-Land is very much the highlight, as it’s always fun and satisfying to score a hit with the various props scattered about . Most importantly, it all feels true to the original.
The various offensive-items scattered throughout the stages are always fun to execute. It’s such a punch to the gut that this never became a franchise. It feels like Mappy-Land only scratches the surface of what you could do with a game like this.
The big twist is that the levels don’t end after you collect the final item. Once you collect six standard items, you typically have to beat-feet it to the exit. Each world features the same eight themed levels, but the level layouts and item locations change each cycle. Not only that, but the win conditions can change from cycle to cycle as well. Sometimes, a stage might require you to collect the six items and then enter another building and collect a final item before you can finish the stage. On the fourth cycle, every stage is set up this way, and by that point, the cats will be faster than you are, as they gain speed over the course of the game. If you know how to play Mappy, you should be able to jump right in. However, while the movement is similar to the original coin-op, the rules aren’t 100% the same.
The level themes really are quite enjoyable, and I appreciate that they changed the look of the enemies to suit the themes. It’s that extra-effort to really create a fun atmosphere.
In the arcade version, I’d come to rely on that teeny tiny grace period of invincibility when cats are coming off the trampoline to survive close-calls. There is no grace period in Mappy-Land. However, you have a seemingly worthless little jump that I originally believed was only good for hopping up to collect the items. My attempts to jump over the smaller cats didn’t pan out. Then, by complete accident, I figured out you COULD hop over them. It’s especially effective if you hop onto a trampoline, which grants you immunity as long as you’re on it. Of course, that it took me so long to realize jumping does work to dodge the cats tells you how picky and unreliable it is, but you need to get the hang of it. While the first cycle is fairly toothless, cycles three and four are stunningly difficult. But, in a fun way. Well.. mostly. Then you get to the jungle level, and you realize how Mappy-Land slipped through the cracks of history.
You can lay down distractions that tie up the cats and make them harmless to the touch. Here, the cats here are playing with a pussy willow. “WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?” “Pussy willows, Dotty!” Serial Mom. Great flick.
Level 4 in each cycle is a jungle theme with vines and moving trampolines. This is the only level where I found myself screaming at the controls and movement physics. Hopping on-and-off moving trampolines feels inelegant. This would be bad enough by itself, but then you also have to deal with the overly sensitive movement across the vines and some very strangely inconsistent collision boxes on the items you must collect. Further combine that with the fact that you can die from falling too far, and it makes for one of gaming’s most all-time janky stages. It’s really sloppily handled, to the point that level four feels like it’s from an entirely different game.
Yea. Simply put: level four is NOT good. At least the trampolines don’t wear out, I guess.
I also wasn’t a big fan of how the level design logic changes in the fourth cycle. The final eight stages of Mappy-Land lean heavily into the fact that falling even a single story kills you. So, they’ll do things like have dead-ends where the trampoline that would normally catch you isn’t there between the gaps anymore. Instead, it’ll be a space over. Even if you use the jump button when leaping off a ledge, your momentum will eventually hit an invisible wall and you’ll fall to your death. On the plus side, it finally gave me an excuse to start using the “distractions” that you can pick up. Cat toys that temporarily pacify the cats. They usually appear after you pick up one of the six items. Then again, there’s also areas in 4th cycle where you can GET STUCK and have no choice but to die. This is total amateur hour bullcrap, right there.
Speaking of bullcrap, the way the bonus stages are hidden is a horrible idea. With the exception of the jungle stage, trampolines wear out, just like they do in the arcade original. If the trampoline turns red, it means it’ll break the next time Mappy lands on it for that series of jumps. If there isn’t a trampoline underneath that one, you will die doing this. Only, sometimes, a seemingly arbitrary trampoline won’t kill you, but instead reward you by sending you to this screen. What a stupid idea. It’d be like Fisher-Price putting out a Russian Roulette game for toddlers.
Mind you, I’m prepared to call Mappy-Land one of the most underrated titles on the NES regardless of how badly that damn 4th level or the entire fourth cycle plays out. BUT, those aspects of the game are so haphazardly programmed that it really lets the air out of what is otherwise one of 8-bit gaming’s great hidden gems. If not for them, Mappy-Land would be a contender for one of THE best games on the Nintendo Entertainment System. For 21 of 32 stages, it might actually be the best marriage of platforming and maze chasing ever made. All the excitement of close-calls and turning-the-tables that a great maze chase has are combined with the satisfaction of level progression and problem solving that a platformer can feature. Mappy-Land deserved a better fate than being a nonentity in gaming history. It’s a one-off, folks. It was completely swallowed-up historically. I blame Gen-X. Y’all should have embraced this more. For shame!
Level 6 in each cycle plays differently from other stages as well. In it, you grab a balloon and float around the stage. Unlike other stages, you have a gun with unlimited firing capability that you can use to destroy the ghosts that chase you. It’s Mappy-Land’s version of the swimming stages in Super Mario: a short, quick distraction from the main style of game, but enjoyable enough. Of course, when you enter the buildings, the gameplay reverts back to the same trampoline-based shenanigans.
Make no mistake: Mappy-Land is tons of fun on levels 1 – 3 and 5 – 8. It really is just that fourth stage that keeps me from screaming “DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND PLAY THIS NOW!” What’s really tragic was that this completely fell by the wayside. In a just universe, Mappy-Land would have spawned its own sub-franchise that would still be thriving today. Instead, Mappy-Land spent over thirty years buried in obscurity before being resurrected twice in the 2020s: once on a lazy, budget level classic collection, and then as a +1 to the Nintendo Switch Online NES library. Nobody really paid attention to either. Gaming really missed out when Mappy-Land failed to find an audience. Yes, it can be janky and problematic, but it also should have been the start of something amazing, and it wasn’t. Verdict: YES! $5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 and a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online.
Legacy of the Wizard
A.K.A. Dragon Slayer IV Drasle Family
First Released July 17, 1987
Developed by Nihon Falcom
It’s absolutely maddening how frequently enemies drop the poison jars, and the annoyance is multiplied by how long they linger on the screen. It’s agonizing having to sit and wait for them to vanish.
I didn’t finish Legacy of the Wizard, a side-scrolling action-adventure with some RPG seasoning. I beat the first two bosses and played a little bit of the third “level” and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m not even sure why it’s in this collection. It wasn’t made by Namco, and wasn’t published by them outside of Japan. It’s part of the Dragon Slayer franchise that never really caught-on in America. Hell, even Nintendo tried to help with that, publishing spin-off game Faxanadu, and it still didn’t take. I wanted to like Legacy of the Wizard a lot more than I did. It’s a game that has insanely fun combat, an underrated soundtrack, and some of the most boring level design I’ve ever experienced in my life. Try imagining if you had an excellent home cooked meal that you had to run a lap or two on a track between each bite, and the only utensil was a spoon. That’s the Legacy of the Wizard experience.
I actually do believe in my heart of hearts there’s a good game somewhere in this mess. A ROM hacker could probably redo the level design and create something special with it.
First off, if you’re planning to play this, open StrategyWiki and at least read the character and item descriptions. Prudent information, like how the dog/monster, Pochi, isn’t damaged by basic enemies? That stuff isn’t covered in the lazy instruction screen provided in Namco Museum Archives. Legacy of the Wizard isn’t as obtuse as some games get, but it’s pretty overwhelming just to get started. You have a vast world of interconnected stages and a whopping five characters to use. The world map is secretly optimized for four of the five characters to explore and collect the game’s crowns, leading to a final battle that only the prodigal son can do. I love the idea. The execution? Not so much.
The first two bosses were toothless. Literally a couple seconds to beat them.
The best thing Legacy of the Wizard has going for it is the combat. With the exception of a pair of shoes that allow you to stomp enemies, platforming game-style, all the combat in Legacy of the Wizard is done by throwing projectiles. You don’t have unlimited attacks, either. Every time you fire a projectile, you use up a little bit of magic. Presumably, this was done to prevent players from spamming the attack button willy nilly. I thought this would be the part of Legacy of the Wizard that annoyed me most, but it works! It actually succeeds in adding strategy and tension to the game without taking anything off the table. And by the way, the combat is fun and satisfying. They just didn’t build the game around it.
It’s genuinely stunning how boring Legacy of the Wizard’s level design is. Clearly developers Nihon Falcom had “labyrinth-like mazes” on their mind. I get what they were aiming for, and it just didn’t work. Too much repetition is one reason why. In the above clip, they created one type of “puzzle” and then made players repeat it eleven times in a row. Other rooms might have you walking around a spiral of blocks to reach a shop in the center of the room, creating an over two-minute-long round trip just to see what’s in the shop. These days, a quality director would put the screws to that kind of mentality. Then again, a game like this today would have an onscreen map with areas you’ve been to being marked off. Legacy of the Wizard would be a much stronger game today. In 1987, very few games felt inclined to give players a sense of direction. One of the few that did, Legend of Zelda, went on to become one of the most cherished titles of all-time and the launching point of one of gaming’s most important franchises. What a coincidence the one game that really went all-in on providing maps and direction was the game that broke through while so many others didn’t.
Legacy of the Wizard has more issues. There’s too much usage of jumping up into rooms and not having anything to land on, so you have to jump up and down swapping rooms looking for a place to actually stand. This is actually the point where I just threw in the towel.
Legacy of the Wizard just doesn’t feel optimized for exploration in general. You take falling damage, and it’s not even that far you have to fall. Then the game literally forces places to take falling damage to get to the hub where the game splits off into the four distinct zones. There’s also some high concept ideas that just don’t work. For example, I started with Pochi, the family dog who turns into a pink monster. The other monsters ignore you, which is a cute gag, but when you stop and think about it, it means the zone you play using Pochi has no stakes. It’s such an absurd idea that my father accused me of using a cheat code, refusing to believe anyone, even in 1987, would design a game where it’s possible to just walk past enemies for an extended portion of the game. Then, with Pochi, I beat the first boss in a couple seconds. The second zone has you take the role of the father. With him, you have to equip a glove and manipulate blocks like the world’s worst version of Sokoban (that’s Boxxle for you old Game Boy owners). Moving the blocks is an unintuitive nightmare. Even with a fairly well made video tutorial by CMDR Sho (and seriously, give him a subscription for this), playing this section was miserable. After hours of hard work getting to the boss, I beat THAT boss after one single second of direct engagement. ONE SECOND! Why even have a boss?
In principle, I like the idea of characters retrieving items for other characters to use. In practice, Legacy of the Wizard undermines this by allowing you to buy the same items if you locate the right shops. It’s so weird. Why would you hide major items in treasure chests in the game and also have the same items in shops? It would be like being able to buy the hookshot in Zelda instead of getting it before you fight a boss. It makes no sense. Oh, and those boots that let you stomp enemies? They actually take the fun out of the game, but the daughter’s attacks are so weak that I found them necessary for her section.
I don’t remember a game that made me scream “WHY WOULD ANYONE BUILD A GAME LIKE THIS?” more than Legacy of the Wizard. A fun idea with a map so tediously laid out that it becomes exhausting. While I would love a ROM hacker to clean up the design, what Legacy of the Wizard really needs is a complete modern remake that keeps the core idea, but redoes the entire map with modern level design logic, a built-in map, and better progression. Legacy of the Wizard is so ambitious for its era, and for that, it has my respect. It just does too many annoying things. Grinding level design. Far too many random whammies in the item drops that could halt your progress since you often have no choice but to just sit and wait for them to disappear. Or not making a bigger deal of hiding items in chests. The locations they’re found don’t feel “special” like the best Metroidvanias do. “Why would they just put this item in this place in this room?” I asked more than once, which strips away that being a “moment.” Ultimately, I could have dealt with every other problem, but the level design was the fatal flaw that I couldn’t overcome. It’s one of those games where I found myself asking “did they have fun playing this?” Because I didn’t. Verdict: NO!
Rolling Thunder
First Released March 17, 1988
Unknown Director
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And the level design hits keep coming. I’m sure Rolling Thunder was cutting edge “back in the day” but it ain’t “back in the day” anymore. Even at its best, Rolling Thunder is a very bland James Bond ripoff where you mostly walk right and shoot clones of Cobra Commander, along with animals and the occasional.. uh.. sentient fire creature? Okay. Oh and Aliens take over in the second story, which I quit after three levels. Rolling Thunder crosses the line from “we’re trying to make a fun game” to “we’re trying to dropkick you, the paying customer, in the ass. Frankly, we already got your money and we really don’t care if you have a good time while we dropkick you in the ass or not.” A boring, lifeless action game based around some of the most infuriatingly cheap enemy placement I’ve seen.
As bad as the first cycle of five stages is, the second cycle is a complete bastard just for the sake of it. Here, you actually can fall into these rings of tires. While that isn’t lethal, there’s no room to maneuver in the one with the laser, which fires a constant pulse. Walking through it would be hard enough, but timing the jumping, with these controls, is painful. AND THIS ISN’T EVEN THE WORST ONE! There’s a second laser/tire pillar that’s placed in a way where you can’t even get onto the rim of the tires. I almost quit there. I might as well have, since it was all downhill from there. Well, really it was all downhill from the moment I pressed start on the title screen.
Rolling Thunder is one of those games where difficulty is created by creating the “actions” a player can do, then building the levels to not be at all compatible with those actions. In Rolling Thunder’s case, there’s three things you need to know: (1) you can’t shoot in any direction but straight ahead. (2) You can’t shoot when you jump. (3) You jump using fixed angles. By time you’re just a few levels into the game, enemies will literally rain down on you, while gaps you must jump over are built so you can’t even turn around once you land. Your pitiful life bar allows you to directly touch enemies once without dying, but bullets are always an instakill. The first five levels are boring and annoying but doable. Dull set pieces and waves of the same enemies, with the occasional attack by cheap-as-all-f*ck owls or fire monsters. All this with sluggish movement and generally unresponsive controls. Even at its best, the violence doesn’t have enough pop to it to make the action exciting, so I’d have given Rolling Thunder a NO! anyway. The worst thing an action game can be is boring, and Rolling Thunder is really boring.
This is the point where I “noped” out and quit Roller Thunder, making its achievement the only one I didn’t get (Legacy of the Wizard has no achievement attached to it). I didn’t need 60 achievement points that badly. These guys jump up just high enough here to ping off your only hit point. Since you don’t blink, if they hit you at the right angle, you’ll be losing the second and fatal hit point almost immediately. If you survive this, about one screen in front of me are a series of single-character-length pillars with instakill pits all around them, where these guys fly up at you in pairs. Whoever made this wasn’t even trying to be fun.
After only five levels, the stages repeat, only they’ve been slightly modified. Also, the enemy placement reaches extremes so brazenly cheap I’m surprised they just didn’t drop you into a fire at the start of each level. The fixed jumping becomes the primary issue. You have to navigate a tire yard with a laser that continuously fires. You have to cross a series of single-body-length pillars with pits all around you WHILE enemies literally fly up at you from the ground. I couldn’t take it. Rolling Thunder might have impressed people in the mid-80s by having large sprites, but the gameplay is absolutely dreadful. Even if this controlled as well as, say, Mega Man, the action is so boring. And really repetitive, too. Rolling Thunder might be the most overrated gaming franchise of the era. After playing the first one, I can’t believe anyone ever wanted a sequel. Verdict: NO!
Dragon Buster II: Yami no Fūin
First Released April 27, 1987
Famicom Exclusive
Developed by Tose
Ignore the title. Besides how the map screen works, Dragon Buster II has very little relationship to the Dragon Buster that I ranked dead last in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. The genre is different. The primary method of attack is different. Oh, and the game is a lot better. I mean, it’s still not fun. Like, at all. Seriously, this is one of the most pointless games I’ve ever encountered. But, at least it controls well enough and isn’t an unplayable nightmare of epic proportions. Hey, an upgrade is an upgrade! It’s not a deep game by any stretch. You select a cave/forest/castle/tower on a map. This time, the action is top-down. You walk through a maze hunting enemies with a flimsy bow and arrow until you kill an enemy who has a key. Once you have the key, you have to find the door and leave. That’s it. You don’t need to search for mythical items or the magic doohickey that allows you to defeat the boss. Find a key, leave, rinse and repeat until you fight a dragon in the final tower to beat that world. Repeat this process over six agonizing worlds of pure digital boredom.
I can’t even say the bosses are good. The first one I ran away from, but once I turned around, the fight was over a second later. Just mash the arrow button and you might lose health, but they’ll die faster than you.
I could get behind a simple, stripped-down maze crawler like this if the combat was fun or the exploration was exciting. Neither is the case here. Inside the actual stages, you can only see so much of whatever level you’re exploring. You have to physically walk into the darkened parts of the screen to light up the next room. To Dragon Buster II’s credit, once a room is lit, it stays lit. As you scroll your character into darkened areas, they light up. You can also hear if enemies are in an unseen area and even fire upon them. It sounds fine, but besides the themes changing, the feel of each stage is so interchangeable and repetitive that it’s exhausting. They’re so bland and so limited in how they can be designed that I really thought they were randomly generated. But, that’s not the case. There’s literally no reason to explore once you have the key. If there were permanent upgrades, that would be one thing, but there ain’t. Dragon Buster II feels like a prototype that has the basics down but hasn’t added the fun parts.
The maps are needlessly large. Sometimes, they’ll drop items that you can use to traverse the map, but none of the items have any use in the actual ACTION parts of the game.
And there’s the combat. This is like a sucky version of the arcade classic Berzerk. You can only fire one arrow at a time. If you miss, the arrow will ricochet. In theory, you can use this to hit enemies from a variety of angles. In practice, I never once found a situation where it made any sense to shoot an enemy from any direction but straight ahead. That’s because they’re often placed right inside the darkness of the next room. The overwhelming majority of enemy encounters start off too close to you. This reduces the “gameplay” to walking into a room, legging it in the other direction while an enemy chases you, then turning around and firing once you’ve scratched-out a safe distance. There is NOTHING to take the edge off this besides a fairly rare and limited-usage fire arrow. Dragon Buster II repeats the same thing over and over for hours. It’s painful.
I was STUNNED that the dungeons aren’t done via procedural generation. I’d of sworn that there’s only a handful of room shapes that were them randomly pieced together.
Enemies get cheaper and spongier as you go along, but combat is still the same premise: walk into a room, run away, then turn around and shoot. If you want to play bolder and try angling your arrows off the walls, keep in mind that your own ricocheting arrows can damage you. Really! In fact, I think I took more damage from missing shots than I did from enemies, even as I got deeper into the game. It’s such a boring setup. Ammo is limited, so in theory the only reason to search the caves is to find more ammo. But, I never ran short on it, and I was exiting caves as soon as I got the key and found the door without even trying to look around. The only other “items” are life restoring faeries and a brief force field. Dragon Buster II is a maze game with no reason to explore. What’s really strange is that the world maps become bigger and bigger and you have freedom to explore different paths, but again, why bother? If there were permanent upgrades, I could see doing these massive maps with tons of different locations. Sigh. What a strange game Dragon Buster II is. It’s like they wanted to keep the arcade-like simplicity and repetitiveness of the original Dragon Buster, only they wanted an entirely different experience. Why bother? There’s nothing here to alleviate the tedium. Verdict: NO!
Mendel Palace
First Released June 27, 1989
Developed by Game Freak
The very first game from Satoshi Tajiri, who went on to create a little franchise known as Pokémon. You know, I think Mr. Tajiri knew what he was doing with this whole gaming thing.
I’m happy to report that Mendel Palace doesn’t just win Best in Set for Volume 2 by default. In fact, my discovery of Mendel Palace is one of the happiest moments of my gaming existence. Folks, this is a great one. An absolute NES masterpiece, the very textbook definition of a hidden gem, and an honest-to-goodness contender for most underrated 8-bit game EVER! It helps a lot that nothing resembling Mendel Palace has been attempted since. It’s the rarest of rare: an amazing game with gameplay mechanics so unique that it’s a literal one-off, and it’s INSANELY FUN! It’s also chaotic, frustrating, and maddening. But fun! Really! This is the best game in the Archives “franchise” by a landslide. The gap between this and the second best game isn’t even close.
Probably the biggest problem with Mendel Palace is there’s too much flicker in it. The more chaotic the action, the worse the flicker is. It’s why I long for a modern remake. Plus, due to the limitations of the Famicom/NES hardware, they couldn’t mix and match enemy types. They could do that now. Mendel Palace could be a great franchise.
In this single-screen action-arcader, you have to shuffle the floor underneath enemies, causing them to fall backwards. If you can get them to fall backwards into a solid surface, they explode with a satisfactory POOF. The object is simple: clear out the enemies. Mendel Palace starts non-linear with players allowed to choose any of the eight main types of what I think are supposed to be living dolls that you must do battle with. Enemy types are never mixed-up, so each stage has you dealing with only one variation of the same type of enemy. Each of the enemies has its own gimmick and matching attack style. Sumos will stomp the ground causing entire rows of panels to shuffle. Others might do nothing but chase you down at first, but eventually split into smaller enemies. There’s baddies that mimic you and mirror your actions, and others that leap before you have a chance to shuffle the panel underneath them. Swimmers shuffle the blocks they move through. If you beat all the basic enemies, you have to face off against ninjas who aggressively shuffle the panels with kicks. They’re ALL fun to do battle with. The combat in Mendel Palace is one-of-a-kind and never gets boring.
Sometimes, the panels will have a solid block. While you can shuffle these panels, you can also use them as surfaces to shatter enemies.
The playfield is the main highlight. The game takes place on a 7 x 5 grid of panels. The panels work like cards that you shuffle through, and might have helpful items or methods of mass attack on them or buried under other panels. Stars are the most common thing you’ll see. If you collect 100 of them, you get an extra life. There’s a randomized prize, though it’s actually not so randomized. In fact, you should be able to clock the timing and use it to score an extra life every single time, and trust me, you’ll need them. Some of the panels are portals that spawn extra enemies, and those will be the bane of your existence. Every time you kill an enemy, if a portal is on the screen, another will spawn until the max of six enemies are on the screen at once. Thankfully, a portal vanishes after a single use, but some stages might have multiple portals on each part of the grid. Some stages you can expect to take several minutes fighting endlessly respawning bad guys until the dozens of portals are all used up. As stages progress, you have to fight different-colored variations of enemies that have variations on their standard attack. They also tend to be faster and more aggressive.
The little orange panels are flipping panels that launch you in the direction you’re facing. If you turn around quickly between two of them, you’ll end up bouncing back and forth. This is a good thing, since any enemies who cross your path while you’re being flung are destroyed. It’s especially helpful in clearing out stages that have tons of portals, which this stage was loaded down with. The stacks of panels can be deep, and some levels might have over a hundred portals to deal with.
Then there’s the mass-attack items. Some will shuffle the panels in four directions. There’s one that you have to time to send a single row of panels shuffling. The big one is the sun, which shuffles every panel on the playfield once in a wave that spreads across the screen. While this could lead to an instakill of every enemy, it also risks exposing more portals and enemy spawns. Then, there’s the most dreaded of all panels: the lock. Once a panel is locked, it can’t be shuffled again. The most difficult enemy type, the artist, has tons of these in their world, and it gets even worse. The artists will draw on the panels, and if you don’t interrupt them, you lose the ability to shuffle once they finish their drawing. Oh, and they might draw more enemies that come to life and begin to attack you. Their “boss fight” is drawing more copies of themselves that can then draw more copies of themselves.
The most difficult boss battle. Admittedly, if the whole game had you fighting the artists, I don’t think I would have liked Mendel Palace as much as I did. I was worried that the game had the potential to “soft lock” on some of their levels, but it turns out, if every single panel becomes unusable, you beat the stage by forfeit. This really only comes into play in the artist stage, though one particular stage with the mimic enemies in the final castle is a pain in the ass too.
There’s two types of boss fights. In some, you have to fight six max-difficulty versions of the enemies of whatever world you’re in. In normal stages, if you lose a life, the level restarts with all the progress you’ve made. So, if there’s only two enemies left instead of six, you start again with only two enemies. That’s not the case in boss battles. You either beat all of them with one life or you start over with all six. These were my favorite boss battles, as the challenge is usually just right. They make for a fitting final challenge for each world.
The other boss type sees you turned into the enemy and having to use their attacks to push the boss up against the wall. It’s not as fun as it sounds, and actually is probably the weakest aspect of the gameplay. It’s the only time when Mendel Palace feels janky. I found the swimmer was the hardest to control, as getting the panels to shuffle was overly difficult and inconsistent. Meanwhile, I beat the sumo level’s “boss” in about one second with my first attack. As much as I love Mendel Palace, it has a serious issue with the difficulty curve. It goes from infuriating to a piece of cake and back again with no buffer in-between. And what was even the f’n point of having the boss turn you into the enemy that mimics you? So dumb. At least there was a boss fight, I guess. The stage with the horned enemies only has a small cut scene where the villain kidnaps the girl. I wish every stage ended with the 6 v 1 battles. Those were always a thrill.
The co-op mode would be perfect if it just let a player press start to continue when they ran out of lives. It was tough for me to play with my family because I knew how to play Mendel Palace and they didn’t. When they suffered a game over, my options were to die on purpose so they could rejoin or keep playing. There’s unlimited continues, so I took the “die on purpose” option. If you could just press start to rejoin, I’d call Mendel Palace the best co-op game on the NES this side of Contra.
While the difficulty can be maddening, I adore Mendel Palace. Worth the price of admission alone? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s the only game in the Namco Archives franchise that I beat solo, then beat co-op, then played the extra levels. Oh, there’s extra levels. When you first load up the game, hold down the Start and Select buttons, then enter the system menu (the save state screen) and select GAME RESET. Keep holding down start and select, and when the game reboots, the title screen lettering will be pink and it’ll have the words EXTRA above the logo. This gives you 100 extra levels of varying difficulty. It’s probably best to think of it as the “hard mode” and I loved it! It’s really rare for any game to inspire me to play through all the extra content, but I did for this one. It speaks to how amazing Mendel Palace is.
If you do it right, it looks like this. 100 extra stages, just like that.
Like Legacy of the Wizard, I’m not entirely sure why it’s part of a Namco collection. It wasn’t developed by them, and it wasn’t published by them outside of Japan. But, I’m really happy it’s here. It’s one of the most unique video game experiences out there. What’s really insane is that this was the debut of Game Freak. I really wish they’d make a Pokémon game based around the mechanics of Mendel Palace. Hell, with its cast of hundreds of colorful critters, you’d think it would lend itself perfectly to Mendel Palace’s formula. It’s wishful thinking, I’m sure. But I always have faith that good ideas will eventually find their audience. Mendel Palace deserves to be a legendary game, and it’ll have to settle for being the best game in the Namco Museum Archives series. Verdict: YES!
$5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2
WINNER: Best in Set
Gaplus
Released June 18, 2020
Developed by M2
Exclusive to Namco Museum Archives: Volume 2
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How’s this for a surprise: I enjoyed this original NES “demake” of Gaplus more than I enjoyed the demake of Pac-Man Championship Edition in Volume 1. Granted, I played the original Championship version of Pac-Man to death, but I’d never even thought twice about Gaplus before this set came out. Shame on me! Gaplus is so good that I should issue fines to all future Namco sets for every instance of including either Galaxian or Galaga without including Gaplus as well. Frankly, the inclusion of a brand spanking new port of Gaplus created just for this set is shocking. Namco has always ignored the third game in the Galaxian franchise, and I don’t get why. Because it didn’t make a gazillion dollars? So let me get this straight: an arcade game released 1984, during a downswing for arcades, didn’t make money? It wasn’t as popular as previous, less good games that came out at the peak of arcade popularity? Get out of town!
Missing from Galaga is the shot-accuracy calculator when you eventually game over. I enjoyed that, so that sucks. This one does ask for your age and blood type when you input your high score. Weird. No doubt a nefarious plot by Namco to gather data on players. Also, I’m O-Positive but there’s no option for positive or negative in the blood types.
Gaplus isn’t just more of the same, either. Among other things, you can now move up and down in addition to left and right. This tiny change has massive ramifications, making the act of dodging so much more intense. And in Gaplus, you don’t have to sacrifice a life just to get a power-up anymore. This time around, when the aliens finish flying into formation, a captured ship will just blink into existence at the top of the screen. When the alien bound to the ship goes on its bombing run, if you shoot it down, you automatically catch the ship it drops and get whatever item it has. One of them sees you firing a tractor beam to capture enemy ships, just like they did to players in Galaga. You can conscript up to four enemies to multiply your firepower and breeze through the first several levels. It’s not the only item though, as you can make your gun more powerful. Another item slows the enemies down and makes them easier to ping off. There’s also a gigantic screw that I didn’t find particularly fun to use since it basically just kills enemies who fly into it. I’m almost certain they would die from flying into my bullets regardless.
In Gaplus, the “challenging rounds” (aka the bonus rounds) are different. This time around, you have to juggle three waves of enemies, not shooting so fast you knock them off the screen. Once I got the hang of this, my scoring average cleared 200K easily.
Maybe I’m slightly overrating Gaplus, but I promised myself that I’d already put too much time into Volume 2 and would only play this for ONE HOUR. But, I ended up spending a whole day messing around with Gaplus anyway. It’s addictive. Hell, just the ability to move up and down like in Centipede pays off massive gameplay dividends. The one knock I have on it is, when the game gets its teeth, a great round of Gaplus turns on a dime. You can go from having plenty of lives to GAME OVER so quickly your head will spin. This has a lot to do with how fast and powerful your cannon can be. You might fly through a dozen or more waves quickly, but one mistake and you’re left with the basic weapon and enemies who can spam the screen with projectiles. Frustrating? Oh yea. Amazingly fun? For sure. Gaplus also shows that this formula can still work, in 2023, if you give the player enough options to keep the fun pumping. Verdict: YES!
$5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2
FINAL NAMCO MUSEUM ARCHIVES RANKINGS
Mendel Palace (Vol 2)
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (Vol 1)
Gaplus (Vol 2)
Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Vol 1)
Mappy-Land (Vol 2)
Mappy (Vol 1)
Dig Dug (Vol 1)
Pac-Man (Vol 1)
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (Vol 1) **TERMINATORLINE**
Back in 2020, Namco put out a pair of eleven-game editions of their endless Museum franchise under the name Namco Museum Archives. What made these different was that they included only NES games. I really thought I’d fly through this review. Play each game for an hour or so, and then move onto Volume 2. 101.8 hours later and I’m done. Okay, in fairness, not all of that was THIS play session. Some of that was from when the collections were released in 2020, and my father also ended up playing some Tower of Druaga on his own. For me personally it was like 90 hours all-in between my original 2020 session and this session.
And I’m not even 100% sure where all the time went. Unlike some of my more complicated Definitive Reviews of collections, I don’t have a lot of extra features to discuss. The presentation is weak sauce. If not for the fact that they went out of their way to produce and include a completely original game in each of the two volumes, I’d call these the most lazy collections Namco has ever stamped their name on.
The instructions for Dragon Buster in their entirety. Now that’s GOD TIER levels of lazy.
Save states and rewind are here. I didn’t use them for the arcade type games like Pac-Man where you’re chasing high scores. Sorta defeats the point, you know? Besides, the way rewind is done is horrible. A prompt pauses the game to confirm you want to rewind. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to disable the prompt. The amount of time isn’t even consistently X amount of seconds. Instead, your gameplay is secretly divided into intervals, and instead of rewinding backwards three seconds, it’ll rewind you back to the last invisible marked three second interval. For games like Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, that might mean rewinding directly into an enemy who damages you, meaning you can’t just go back 3 seconds but rather 6, or even longer to find a clean “spot.” Why not just let players hold a button down?
What’s really, REALLY strange is Namco & M2 went above and beyond with one specific extra feature in each set: a brand spanking new NES game that demakes an established classic. Volume 1 got Pac-Man Championship Edition. Volume 2 gets Gaplus, aka the sequel to Galaga that never came home (except for the Commodore 64 of all things). Both are excellent NES ROMs I’m happy to have, but I’d of chosen to have a better presentation and more emulation flexibility/options any day.
Normally, I’d just award such a crappy design $0, but the fact that they DID include the features, only they did a half-assed, terrible job pisses me off to no end. I’mfining Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 & 2 $5 in Value each for the shamefully annoying rewind system and overall lazy design because I know M2 is capable of a lot better than this. There’s also no button remapping. There’s no quick save-reload. It’s a bare-bones collection. Oh, it’s only $20? Cool. Yea, so are many other classic collections. Don’t be lazy. Have a little pride in your work. And then you get to the presentation. Bland menus. No instruction books, and the absolute laziest instruction screens I’ve seen in one of these collections yet. Compare what we got in America to what Japan got in the same premise: Namcot Collection. It looks like this:
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I’m also fining an additional $5 in value to both Archives collections for lazy presentation and lack of extras. Another instance of “normally it would be just no value awarded” and I’d leave it at that. But, since Japan’s collection was different and had a more fun presentation, I can’t ignore it here. There’s no box art. There’s no instruction manuals. There’s NOTHING! I mean, come on guys, this is pathetically lazy. Namco and M2 have been doing retro collections forever, and they are so much better than this.
THE EVERCADE FACTOR IS IN PLAY
Evercade has a pair of Namco sets that, while out of print, I happen to own. This time around, I primarily played the Namco Museum Archives version, but I did at least fool around for a few minutes with each version on Evercade as well. Since these are out of print, the prices might fluctuate. The same value applies: $5 per YES! If the total value adds up to the listed price of the set, I recommend it! If not, I don’t! Easy peasy! Not all games in each Evercade cart will be covered, but this review might help you decide. No Evercade game requires a special citation, as they’re the same games, people. It’s NES versions of old games. This will be a cinch!
THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Better luck with Volume 2, chaps.
Starting with this Definitive Review, I will no longer award collections my Seal of Approval. Instead, I’ll only use the value I place on them, and if the value equals the game’s MSRP, I recommend it always. If not, I recommend it if you can buy the game for close enough to the total value I assign. For Namco Museum Archives Volume 1’s set of eleven NES games, I think a fair value for a quality NES game is $5. Namco Museum Archives has an MSRP $19.99. Therefore, $20 in value would mean I always recommend it, with no asterisks. However, the final tally is as follows:
YES!: 6 games totaling $30 in value. NO! 5 games. Fines: $15 in Value
Price: $19.99 FINAL VALUE: $15
Namco Museum Archives is NOTrecommended at the normal MSRP. However, if you can get it at 25% discount, I feel it’s worth it. If you’re not as big as I am on the emulation features working good, then don’t even wait for a sale. You’ll get $20 worth of fun out of this.
FINAL RANKINGS
How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Mappy
Dig Dug
Pac-Man
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend **TERMINATORLINE**
Xevious
Sky Kid
Tower of Druaga
Galaxian
Dragon Buster
GAME REVIEWS
SPECIAL NOTE: For each game that’s a port of an arcade title, which most of these games are, I included a slideshow comparing the Famicom/NES port to the arcade original. The arcade games are NOT included in Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 or Vol 2.
Galaxian
First Released September 7, 1984
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Haruhisa Udagawa
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
Space Invaders….. IN SPACE!!
I’ve ranted and raved about my disdain for Galaxian for a while. I’m sure that, in 1979 (Japan) and 1980 (USA) this was mind blowing. Space Invaders.. IN COLOR.. and what’s this? Enemies dive at you in attack formations? And don’t forget the subdued but spot-on sound design, an underrated contributor to why Galaxian rose above the crowded pack of those riding the Space Invaders wake, in my opinion. I assume it was gobsmacking. BUT, I can only assume. I wouldn’t be born for another ten years, and my hardcore game playing days didn’t kick-of until a full nineteen years after Galaxian’s release. By then, Namco’s other gallery shooter, Galaga, essentially the same game as Galaxian, only.. you know.. better, was seventeen years old. And I don’t like it, either.
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It’s not that I can’t love a really old gallery shooter. I’m very fond of Namco’s other other shooter, King & Balloon. Oh, and Sega’s Carnival. Top notch game. I’m so sick of Galaxian acting as +1 in these sets. If you’re going to be comprehensive? Fine. If not, pick another game, Namco. It’s even worse in the Archives series. First off, the port is TERRIBLE! It’s so much noticeably slower and more sluggish than the arcade version. If that lent tension to the game, I’d be all for it, but it takes away from the excitement. Also, the sound effects are weak as hell. There’s really no reason to include this as anything but a bonus. Yet, it’s here, and not as a +1. Namco was insistent that each volume have exactly 11 games. So this time, Galaxian actually took the spot of another game. Okay, so be it! Verdict: NO! and I’m issuing a $5 fine in Value against Namco Museum Archives Vol 1. The fine SHOULD be $80 since Japan got SIXTEEN games we didn’t get in the US (or $55, since the US got five exclusive games Japan didn’t get). It really pisses me off that they put Galaxian in this thing. Evercade is exempt from the fine because they don’t limit themselves to a specific number of titles. However, they are owed exactly one swift kick in the ass which I am unable to issue myself as I’m just not flexible or tall enough to carry out the sentence, so that sentence will be suspended until further notice.
One game into a set of eleven games and Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 has lost $15 in value.
Pac-Man
First Released November 2, 1984
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
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I think this port has to be neck-and-neck with Super Mario Bros. for “the game that got re-released the most times to the Famicom/NES.” Five times. The original Famicom cart, then a Famicom Disk System release, a licensed Tengen release, an unlicensed Tengen release, and one final cash grab Namco release in the US as late as 1993. How’s that for trivia? Pac-Man was both among the first Famicom releases and one of the last NES releases. Besides the bonus fruit looking noticeably low-detailed, this seems like an accurate 240 dot representation of Pac-Man, right? But, it only passes the eye-test if you don’t understand how the ghosts work. Each of the ghosts has their own personality and attack style, but all four always operate under two main principles: SCATTER (so the ghosts spread out and don’t cluster-up at all times) and CHASE (where their attack patterns kick-in and they pursue you). It’s like a game of Red Light – Green Light, and when the green light comes on and SCATTER becomes CHASE, it affects all the ghosts. You can even see the moment it happens, and exclusively on the NES, it happens differently.
In the arcades, the ghosts will pick a different direction when the parameters change-over. BUT, on the NES, they will always reverse directions. If they’re going up, they’ll go down. Left? Right. Coke? Pepsi. You get the idea. This actually has significant gameplay ramifications. In theory, the ghosts swam you much more efficiently on the NES. In practice, this really didn’t affect me until the later stages, and.. actually I think I had an easier time reaching my normal 50,000 point benchmark before crapping the bed. Then again, I’ve been playing so much Pac-Man these days that we can’t rule out that I’m just getting good at it. Anyway, this is a basic, bare bones game of Pac-Man. I have a motto for games I’ve previously disliked that I have to replay for these projects. “Find the fun.” I’ve never really enjoyed the original Pac-Man. My attitude has always been “why play this when Ms. Pac-Man offers the exact same gameplay, only more challenging and more variety?”
My best not cheating game. Baby steps.
While I still stand by that, I now admit there’s an odd amount of satisfaction to be found. Satisfaction in mastering the one single Pac-Man maze and knowing where I’m at my most safe and most vulnerable. Satisfaction from mastering the four ghosts through repetition and finding that their once complex patterns started to reveal their hidden simpleness that I see clearly now. And, ultimately, satisfaction in seeing my average score slowly but surely start to rise. As my wise-beyond-her-years sister tactfully reminded me, it’s not that different from pinball, where machines are limited to one game, forever. Yet, I’ve dedicated a massive amount of my free time towards mastering many tables. How is it different? She’s right. It’s not. Speaking of Angela, I did manage to further “find the fun” to some degree from dueling with her at Pac-Man. Yea, turns out, she’s a Pac-Man natural and she smoked me a few games. But I still won the most. I’m awesome. Am I going YES!? I wasn’t going to, until she pointed out I made a rule for myself: more fun than not has to be a YES!, regardless of why. So, yea, welcome to the YES! pile, Pac. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
Xevious
First Released November 8, 1984
Directed by Kazuo Kurosu
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription
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I can totally understand how Xevious touched off a massive rush to arcades in Japan in the early 80s. While it wasn’t exactly the first of its breed (among others, Konami’s Scramble beat it to arcades by a full year), I think Xevious was probably the best of those early shmups. It was also doomed to age very badly. I’ve encountered it a few times in these retro runs of mine, and just the thought of having to play it again sends a shiver down my spine. One gun, one bomb, and the same boring terrain over and over. Then I played the NES version, with its much lower resolution graphics, and I longed for the grim specter of death. Among other things, it looks like NES Xevious takes place above Rally X’s track. I love Rally X. I wanted to land the ship and drive on the road. But, you can’t do that. I checked and everything.
A game accomplishing a series of firsts is impressive. It doesn’t mean I’d want to play those in 2023 as anything but historic curios. Here’s the famous “first boss” and folks, it ain’t all that.
Namcot’s port to the NES does actually have one fairly major benefit: I felt the collision boxes with the bombs were much more generous than in arcades. In the coin-op, I’d be frustrated with shots that sure looked like they were directly on the targets on the ground, only for them to whiff. That happened a lot less on the NES build. It just seemed like an easier experience. The problem is that I’d simply never, ever, EVER want to play Xevious today over any number of options. It’s also not in the same boat as Pac-Man in that regard. Pac-Man’s maze is.. well.. Pac-Man. The Maze Chase hasn’t been systematically improved by major leaps and bounds in the over four decades that followed. Shmups? They’re leaps and bounds above where they used to be. I salute Xevious for its part in making the shmup genre amazing, but, I’d also rather play almost anything else, including the Super Xevious sequel that we’ll be seeing in Volume 2. Verdict: NO!
Mappy
First Released November 14, 1984
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Nobuyuki Ōnogi
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
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There are several Golden Age of Arcade “franchises” that got left in the dust that I’d love to see be revived and thrive in today’s climate. Mappy is somewhere near the top. I loves me some Mappy. The NES version is not remotely a direct port. Like most home versions of the game from this era, it’s missing an entire floor. The arcade game has six floors of action. The NES only has five. Oddly, I find the change doesn’t matter all that much. You’d think it would make the gameplay more difficult, since it’s one less channel for your pursuers to be on. But, actually, I didn’t feel it added or subtracted to the sense of tension or excitement at all. It’s a complete non-factor, and I didn’t expect that.
I know this is a weird thing to complain about, but, I personally think the weak links in Mappy are the bonus stages. I wish the game had fewer of them. They happen after the second level, then after every three levels from there out. “You’re seriously bitching about BONUS levels, Cathy?” Yep. They last too long and they’re not exciting at all. They’re a constant interruption of the game itself, and I hate them. They play terribly, too. Like, I’m touching this balloon here. That should be a capture, but it’s not. I hate these stages. Come on, Mappy! You’re a cop! Arrest someone. Murder of Fun in the First Degree!
What matters a lot more is the sense of speed of the game. Mappy on the NES feels like it plays a lot faster. I wasn’t sure if it was just me, so I tried an experiment. Neither my father, nor Angela, are familiar with Mappy. I had them play both the arcade game and the NES version in the collection. To eliminate the potential of implanting a bias in their head, when it came time for them to play NES port, I said “is it just me, or is this slower than the arcade version?” Both Dad and Angela said something along the lines of “actually, I think it’s a little bit faster!” So, it’s not just me. Oh, and it’s neither faster or slower, by the way. Rather, it seems to be the result of a quirk of perspective. Like most Namco coin-ops, Mappy utilizes a vertical monitor. With the NES presentation stretched to fill the 4:3 aspect ratio, it makes the movement feel a lot faster despite the fact that you’re covering the same amount of territory you would in the arcade. However, perception is reality, and the feeling of faster movement certainly made an already thrilling game much more exciting.
I think the Bell should have been a kill on the enemies, like the shock waves from the red-doors. Since enemies respawn anyway, it would add to the strategy AND add to the tension. Mappy works because you have to learn to not charge down one of the hallways when you don’t know the location of the enemies. Well, with the bell, you do know where they are. And it takes away from the fun.
While I give the edge to Popeye as the best maze chase done from a side perspective, I hold Mappy in very high esteem. It’s probably a very close second to that sailor guy. It checks off all the boxes of a great maze chase. A never-ending sense of tension, nail-biting close calls, and turning the tables on the chasers is so satisfying. In fact, Mappy probably is the best of its entire breed at that final part, because the means to fight back require such a degree of risk. You have to wait for the enemies to get near you to use the doors against them, and the twitchy moment where you smack ’em is always delightful. You know what I’ve come to learn about this series? It would make a great horror game. I’m serious! Think about it: the main thing you need to learn is not to charge down a hallway just because it looks like the coast is clear. If it was a guy in a hockey mask who suddenly popped onto the screen instead of mischievous cats, you’d crap yourself. I’m telling you, Namco, you’re leaving money on the table. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
Dig Dug
First Released June 4, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Director Unknown (Hiroki Aoyagi?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
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As I learned in part two of Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include, a little Dig Dug goes a long way. I enjoy it, but in small doses. This was probably my most enjoyable experience reviewing it yet. A big part of that is Dig Dug on the Famicom is a pretty good port of the arcade game. A few small annoyances stand out. It’s noticeably less colorful than its coin operated brethren. The Famicom translation looks really washed-out and a lot less cheerful. It’s brown and muddy in appearance, and if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a game about tunneling through dirt, I’d probably take issue with that. The NES also has more flicker than previous ports I’ve reviewed in this set. I get it. It’s a complicated game, especially for its time. But, it does stand out.
Yep, this is pretty good. Timing feels accurate. Tension increases at the right pace. I’m curious why this never came out in the United States. Dig Dug II did, although it was Bandai who ported it over. It’ll be part of Volume II.
With the nit-picking out of the way, this is a pretty dang effort. Very close to the feel of the coin-op, and with most of the personality intact. All the sound effects are retained. The idiosyncrasies of the arcade version seemed to have been retained. If anything, I think the NES is a bit more generous with allowing the pump to pass through the little slivers of dirt that you haven’t finished tunneling through. I still think Dig Dug takes too long to find its teeth, but once it does, few action games from this era are as intense while retaining their satisfaction as the little sadistic pest exterminator. Also, why isn’t this called Dig Doug? It’s because his name is Taizo Hori, which means “digging enthusiast.” Yea, that’s what he’s into. He’s not a psychopath who loves to explode the guts of creatures all over the place. No sir. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
The Tower of Druaga
First Released August 6, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Koichi Yamamoto
Designed by Masanobu Endō
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 2
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How’s this for ominous: the designer of Tower of Druaga has publicly stated his regret that he added so much abstract design with the items in the game and how to acquire them, which left players in a state of paranoia. Well, doesn’t that just sound delightful? This is probably the most polarizing of Namco’s Golden Age lineup. The people who like it? They really like it. Everybody else is just sort of bored by it, not actively hating it, but just not wanting anything to do with it. I’m in the “bored” camp. I find Tower of Druaga to be a miserable slog to get through. A game where the highlight for me was admiring how many better games this inspired. Especially the original Legend of Zelda. You can literally see it, especially in the enemy design. The Darknuts and Wizzrobes in Zelda are so close in their design to Tower of Druaga that I’m honestly shocked this wasn’t a thing Nintendo and Namco had to deal with. At the same time, given what Druaga aims for, it sure seems tailor made for the home consoles more than arcade. It was a major hit on the Famicom, but it never came out in America, nor did the arcade game. I couldn’t figure out why, and then I really dug in and played it. I don’t agree this aged badly. I’m guessing most players would have never found this to be fun.
It’s not just the enemy behavior. The models for the wizards and knights (can we call them Warriors? Then they’d be WIZARDS & WARRIORS!) look like Zelda, only this came out twenty months earlier.
Funny enough, while I find arbitrary abstractness-type of gameplay to be annoying (see my review of Vs. The Goonies), the primary reason I don’t like Tower of Druaga is the combat is shockingly, stunningly, unfathomably featherweight. This is structured just like a tanks-in-a-maze type of game, only you get a flimsy pointy stick instead of bullets. You have to draw your sword out, and then you just hold the button down and walk into enemies, who vanish when they die in the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. It lacks what I call “OOMPH!” That’s my term for violence in video games having the sensation of real weight and crunch. You get a sound effect, but they didn’t even animate the enemies shattering into pixels or anything. Even the arcade version does nothing, so it’s not like the OOMPH got lost in translation. My father, who actually really enjoyed this (the weirdo) said “come on, Cathy! You’re supposed to use your imagination!” Nuts to that! It’s an f’n video game! It’s supposed to do the imagining for me!
The game’s dragons aren’t visually intimidating. Like all enemies, no OOMPH. How combat works with the non-single-hit enemies is you sorta hold out your sword and.. uh.. walk back and forth, passing each other until one of you dies. Apparently you do have an invisible life bar, but otherwise, it’s like giving a lethal dose of the cold shoulder. I believe the technical term is performing a “Do Si Do” which makes Tower of Druaga the first game that does combat by square dancing.
With unsatisfying combat, the actual point of the game becomes a chore. The mazes are boring. They all look exactly the same in terms of backgrounds: a plain ass brick wall. The first two levels are like the mirror universe version of Super Mario 1’s levels, which brought the goods and dared players to keep coming. Druaga practically dares players to not fall asleep, as your character walks like he’s made an oopsie daisy in his pants and is trying to shimmy to the bathroom using a stride that keeps it from running down his legs. Thankfully, level 2’s treasure is a pair of boots that doubles your speed. Of course, you have to find it. The real hook to Druaga is that every level has a treasure chest that you can’t see at first . While the levels are randomized, including the locations of the door, key, and treasure chest, the means to get the chests and what the items are in them are the same every play through. That sounds reasonable, right?
Tower of Druaga is the annoying kid who takes it too far. Like having paper footballs flicked at your face, and the person doing it says BOOM! HEADSHOT! every time. *SNAP* *WHACK* “BOOM! HEADSHOT!” I know. I used to be the flicker. Now, I’m the flickee.
You have to activate them via some arbitrary event that isn’t stated. Killing X amount of enemies on one level. Swinging a sword before taking your first step on another level. Drawing the sword out while standing on the door. Clearing out one type of enemy without killing another. Standing an egg on its end during the winter equinox while standing on one foot and saying all the elements on the fourth row of the periodic table in reverse alphabetical order. Oh, and sometimes the items might be GOTCHA! type of booby traps with hurtful items, but you can’t actually know that until you get them. Call for a penis shaped U Haul because that’s a DICK MOVE! And then, if you miss the right items, you might end up having to wander through a maze in the dark, or LOSE YOUR SWORD and be unable to attack. Every time I wanted to sling my controller in rage, I’m reminded the creator admitted he took it too far and had some regrets regarding difficulty and how the items were handled. That’s curiously refreshing. You almost never hear that from a creator of a legendary game. Dude is classy.
See the little glove item? Yea, I was missing an item, so I got the wrong glove from a chest, and that lost me my sword, thus removing my ability to engage in combat. I can report that there’s no noticeable difference in OOMPH following this.
And yes, fans of Druaga, I do understand: the basic idea was players would take notes and share their experience and, through collective learning, gain the ability to defeat the game. In arcades, this would require players to ignore all the shiny, beautiful other titles around them while they invested their lives in a slogathon with some of the worst sword combat I’ve ever seen and some of the most GOTCHA! type design in the entire history of the medium. Items that blindly hurt you. Enemies that can blink into existence and fire projectiles at you before you can block their attack. I had rounds where I spawned, took a step to the side and immediately died because a wizard teleported there too. I was originally prepared to accept the “you had to be there” argument for Tower of Druaga, but.. actually, no. Seriously, this game is horrible. Respect and celebrate it from a big, big distance. I think most of the inspiration it gave was people saying “what if we made a game like Tower of Druaga only.. you know.. fun?!”
There’s a built-in second quest. On the title screen, press UP six times, LEFT four times, and RIGHT three times. If you do it right, the title screen will turn green. I didn’t like Druaga once. I can’t imagine wanting to play it with more difficulty a second time. The biggest difference is the methods used to unlock the items are changed from the arcade original. So hey, if you like completely arbitrary hidden items, you’re in for a treat!
I didn’t finish Tower of Druaga. Even with a guide, progress is too slow and the cheap deaths resulted in my rage quit thirty or so floors in. You know what? Masanobu Endō straight-up admits the difficulty was too high, so props to him for blazing a trail in the adventure genre. I literally cannot appreciate what this game meant to the generation before me. I wouldn’t be born for another five years after this released, and I grew up in the internet era of gaming. Instead of learning about these things by sharing them peer to peer, in arcades, I could just go to StrategyWiki. The excitement of discovery is gone, and I have no desire to “play this straight.” It’s just not fun to play in 2023, and while I was originally heart sick that I missed out on an era where the abstract design was part of sharing the experience with others.. honestly, I think I would have always hated Tower of Druaga. It has nothing I enjoy in gaming. It’s one of Namco’s very worst, folks. Thanks for all the inspiration for better games, though. Verdict: NO!
Sky Kid
First Released August 22, 1986
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi
Evercade: None
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Unlike Druaga, I did finish Sky Kid, and my hands hate me for it. I was literally screaming in both agony and rage by the end. It’s such a shame too, because it sure feels like the gameplay could be made into a great game with the right level design. While a lot of the combat is your basic, bare bones pew pew action, Sky Kid is a completely original take on the genre with big twists to shmup convention that, in theory, work well. First: getting shot by itself doesn’t kill you. You start to go into a tailspin, and if you mash the buttons fast enough, you can pull out of it and carry on like nothing happened. This didn’t help me all that much since I’m now physically incapable of mashing buttons quickly. Of course, if another bullet hits you as you’re spinning downward, or if you were too close to the ground to begin with, you’re going to crash anyway. Still, it’s different. Also different: every stage begins with having to physically take-off from the runway. Which is basically saying “hold UP when the level begins or you will immediately lose a life.” Then you have to land at the end of the stage, though “landing” requires no finesse. Just ram your plane in the designated area and you’re good. Hey, if it works Harrison Ford, right?
There’s a two player simultaneous co-op that’s misery to experience. Also, if one player dies, they don’t respawn immediately, like the best shmups. No, you have to wait for the other player to die or finish the stage to start playing again. Oh, and you can collide with each-other, which stuns one of you. It wasn’t any fun.
Another twist is you have a unique defensive maneuver: a speedy loop that allows you to quickly get behind enemies tailing you. Or just zip around the screen faster. Or hilariously crash into the scenery. It was usually that third one for me. It also comes with the added bonus of allowing you to fire in different directions. AND, when you’re physically performing the loop-de-loop, you can pass right through enemies and take no damage. It sounds great, and it works really well.. on the arcade version. At least for two specific angles. In fact, in arcades, I had the two angles I could consistently hit clocked so well that they became instinctive for me to use. That never happened on the NES, where the backflip happens too fast. It’s almost impossible to time shooting with it. It’s still really handy, and I was able to get the timing down for when it grants “invincibility” for lack of a better term, but the satisfaction is significantly muffled on the NES.
I was pretty proud of this screenshot of me flipping perfectly between two enemies. Unlike on my PC, where I spam the CAPTURE SCREEN button I mapped to my controller, on Xbox, I had to hit the guide button at the right moment, which pauses the action and then press Y to do a screencap. Xbox doesn’t allow you to make a clip and then take screenshots from the clip. So annoying.
Sky Kid’s final unique approach is that, as the stage progresses, you’ll encounter a bomb on the ground. You have to swoop down, grab the bomb, then drop it on a primary target. The further into the game you make it, the more often there’s bombs and big things to make go boom. This gameplay mechanic is, to put it mildly, f’n awesomeballs. I cannot stress enough how satisfying it is to deliver a payload perfectly in the center of the target (and it MUST be the center to level the whole structure). Easily one of the all-time great thrills in the shmup genre. Now, you don’t actually NEED to bomb the target, but if you’re chasing points, they’re worth the most points by far.
This is a mechanic I want to see Namco explore further in the 2020s. I’m picturing it with claymation-like graphics too. I really think there’s legs to this. That’s one thing about going through these old games.. some of them have ideas that have gone so underutilized in the decades that have followed that they can still feel fresh today. EVEN GAMES I HATE, like Sky Kid. Maybe I’m being a sentimental sap, but I actually take comfort from that. Gaming? Run out of ideas? My friends.. not every good idea in games have actually been used in goodgames.
However, there’s a couple of catches. When you’re carrying the bomb, you can’t do the defensive flip, which I had come to rely very heavily on. Enemies absolutely swarm you, and some of them just make a beeline for you to suicide-bomb. These baddies are especially hard to avoid even with the backflip. Without it? You’re f-ed in the a. Also, if you get shot.. even once.. you lose the bomb. I’d say this adds to the risk/reward gameplay, but Sky Kid goes to absurd lengths to stack the deck against you with the bomb. Well, it does that in general, actually. Yea, the problem with Sky Kid is that you really can’t out-maneuver bullets. I suppose you can’t in real life either, but hey, it’s a video game.
See all those flowers I’m flying through? Yea, those are explosions, and if you touch any of the landscape, you die as well. My biggest problem with Sky Kid is there’s no consistent pattern to when or which direction enemies will fire, so what killed you in one life might not be what kills you in the next. The trick is timing when to do a flip, as you’re immune to damage. But, if the enemies are firing out of sync, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Sky Kid is a merciless bully of a game. Unlike my favorite NES shmups, stuff like Gradius or Life Force, the degree of randomness and blind luck makes Sky Kid kind of unclockable. Sometimes enemies shoot at you. Sometimes they don’t. I discovered this while rewinding. I’m sure there’s some kind of rhyme or reason to it if you devote a lifetime to figuring out Sky Kid’s idiosyncrasies, but it’s not really that fun to begin with. A big problem is they didn’t really build the level design around the best parts of the game: the bombing runs. In fact, the way enemies are placed doesn’t feel like any fine-tuning or optimization was done at all. You can’t linger near the back of the screen. There’s enemy planes who attack by crashing into you, and they seem to always appear at whatever height you’re at. You can keep doing the loop, but bullets will fly out of sync. Use the button mashing to save yourself in the tailspin? Good luck with that. They’ll keep shooting your plane on the way.
There’s tons of bonus points for doing a loop in the right spot, usually with some visual gag tied to them. Even this mechanic is annoying because it’s not always clear where you do it to trigger the bonus. I passed by this several times and got nothing, and when I *did* get it, it sure seemed like it was looping in almost the same spot it didn’t count before. I hate Sky Kid on the NES.
Sky Kid’s difficulty isn’t the only problem. The best part of the game: the bombing run? Sometimes the target is too far from the bomb. If enemies are behind you, your only defensive option is to manipulate them into flying into the scenery, which kills them. When the suicide fighters show up on screen, which they frequently do when you have the bomb, you’re probably going to lose the bomb. Sky Kid also has collision detection issues. Later in the game, you have to pass over volcanoes that spew projectiles onto the screen. The boxes for these don’t match the graphics, so what felt like a safe squeeze was still death. Plus, again, they fire randomly. It crosses the line several times over, and ultimately, Sky Kid just isn’t fun at all. When I first started playing it, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a more revered game. It has so many fun and novel ideas. The answer quickly revealed itself: it does everything it can to negate the fun stuff. It’s a cruel design just for the sake of it. For arcades, maybe that makes sense. Players can’t last too long if you want to make money. But you still have to be just fun enough for them to want to reload the quarters. It makes zero sense for a home game. I’d like to see Sky Kid make a comeback, but I hope it’s balanced when it does. Verdict: NO!
Dragon Buster
First Released January 7, 1987
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Haruhisa Udagawa Kumi Hanaoka
Evercade: None
The attack is flimsy as hell. The animation of the attack kind of reminds me of Kid Niki. Except, that game had OOMPH.
Nothing bad I can say about Dragon Buster can take away from its place in gaming history. For, it was Dragon Buster that introduced to the medium that most absurd, illogical, and downright fun of gaming ideas: the double jump. Yep, apparently this was the first game that said “logic be damned: let the hero jump a second time, midair, using literal nothingness to build that extra momentum!” For that, I would like to offer it a toast! 🍺 Thank you for creating one of my favorite tropes in gaming. Cheers! 🍻 And now that you’ve got alcohol in you, you’re in the proper condition required to actually enjoy Dragon Buster. To everybody else, HOLY CRAP Dragon Buster is a horrible game. At least on the Famicom, but, hey, I can’t really review the arcade version in this feature, you know.
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Another Famicom exclusive that is, at first, baffling as to why it never came out in America. You mean to tell me NOBODY saw value in a sword and sorcery platformer? It took me until, oh, about half way through the game’s second world to figure out the answer to that. I should have known before then just from the fact that, of all the achievements for Vol 1 on Xbox, the one for finishing Dragon Buster had the fewest people completing it, even less than Druaga or Sky Kid. Even with cheating, I couldn’t finish this. I couldn’t come close. Dragon Buster on the Famicom is hampered by four major issues. The first is the controls are terrible. That first-of-its-kind double jump is hard to execute consistently. Even as I was hours into my Dragon Buster play session, I’d still find myself meekly jumping up and down and wondering why the second the jump wouldn’t happen.
This is the second game in the collection where it feels like the creators of a better franchise took inspiration, meaning they said “do that, only less sucky.” In this case, the Wonder Boy franchise does what Dragon Buster does, only oodles better. The big fight with the dragon at the end of each world reminded me very much of The Dragon’s Trap. In fact, a ton of this game did.
The second issue is that the game is based around these “guardian” mini-boss encounters. Despite the fact that neither the levels nor the items in them are randomly generated, the guardians you face are decided at random. Hell, you can rewind and change which one appears. It won’t take long to get a “favorable” one since there’s only four in the entire game. Third: the combat is pathetic. It’s feathery and weightless, completely devoid of OOMPH, and highlighted by some of the worst collision detection I’ve dealt with. When you get hit, you become stun-locked and end up in a juggle. It reminded me of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. Except, in that game, at least you “blink” so you aren’t taking damage while the poor bastard you’re controlling looks at the camera in screaming agony as he hops up and down, stun-locked by the collision boxes. In Dragon Buster, there’s no blinking, meaning it’s YOU screaming in agony as your health ticks away. There’s occasional health refills, but mostly you get offensive spells. To the game’s credit: the spells work. To its detriment: you get too many of them and not enough fun permanent upgrades.
I can’t imagine that ANYBODY had the patience to play Dragon Buster in the days before rewind. The act of jumping, or even just getting on and off vines, requires the patience of Job. While you don’t take falling damage, I found that, no matter how much I took my time lining up to hop off the vines and onto a platform, sometimes I’d just stop and fall the full length of the climb. Sometimes that’s several floors. I’ll concede that it was 1987 and they had no clue what they were doing. Of course, seven months after this came out, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, the game that would be converted into Super Mario Bros. 2, released in Japan. You have to wonder if Dragon Buster’s creators saw that and were like “jeez.. I wish our vine acrobatics were this good.”
The fourth issue is, frankly, Dragon Buster is just no damn good. I’m not fining it, like I did Galaxian because at least it’s a game that rarely shows up in these collections. However, this is easily the worst game in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. Of all the games in the collection that are based on coin-ops, this is the least faithful in terms of feel. It’s so bad, it feels like you’re playing a bootleg or knockoff. Even things like rewinding or save states don’t reduce the tedium as much as you’d think. Not when the game controls this badly. Not when it has combat this sloppy. Not when the entire premise is doomed to fail. Hey, thanks for inventing the double jump. Now double jump your ass off a cliff. Verdict: NO!
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend
First Released April 14, 1989
Directed by Haro 7000 (?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 2
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Technically, this isn’t a port of the arcade Dragon Spirit. No, this is supposed to be a sequel. But, really, “The New Legend” is certainly supposed to invoke the coin-op experience. To be honest, I liked the NES game better. Dragon Spirit is one cruel-ass game in arcades. It’s just more manageable on the NES. And, actually Dragon Spirit isn’t bad by any means. It was also bland enough that I got really mad that it wasn’t better. Everything is in place for an unforgettable shmup experience. I’ve never enjoyed the Xevious-like “shoot flying enemies, bomb ground-based enemies” type of design. While Dragon Spirit: The New Legend doesn’t change my mind, it’s probably done in the most tolerable way I’ve ever played here. Enemy placement of the ground-based enemies doesn’t seem specifically designed to trigger cheap gotcha deaths. So, hey, it seems like we’re off to a good start. Right?
The bosses are mostly fun to do battle with, but you’ll also walk away thinking “that could have been a lot better if they had a better presentation.”
Yet, it just never rises above barely okay. Part of that is the lack of immersion due to some of the worst sound design on the NES. It’s never fun to shoot a boss and have no squishy “hit noise” attached. It always takes me out of the game. Shame too, because there’s some decent boss fights here, but I’d take anything from Konami’s famous NES shmups over any of them. They’re just more fun to do battle with. Everything about Dragon Spirit on the NES feels unfinished. The graphics are ugly. The enemy design is unremarkable. Most of the levels and set pieces are boring. I really didn’t think this would be getting a YES! And yet, I’m giving it one. Dragon Spirit on the NES is the poster child for doing the bare minimum to get by.
They went back to this type of “don’t touch the walls” design in the stage after it, only I didn’t realize that was what it was doing. Dragon Spirit has visibility issues on the NES. However, in this stage? I was impressed.
When Dragon Spirit cooks, it really cooks. When I entered the stage in the above screenshot, I literally sat up in my chair. It was one of the better “don’t touch the walls” segments in an 8-bit shmup I’ve encountered. The problem is, of the nine levels, maybe three of them are that interesting. Maybe. This also handled a relatively large character sprite better than most shmups that try that. Because of the large character, I would have bet the farm that collision boxes would be an issue. But, actually, the collision seems spot-on, and I would have been farmless.
This is probably the weakest stage. Enemy projectile visibility is a big issue throughout Dragon Spirit. Now, I’ve heard people say that back in the days of CRT monitors, that wasn’t an issue. Well, what do you know? This offers CRT filters. So, I checked and yea, it was certainly still an issue. I don’t see how it helped at all, frankly.
Most of all, I really enjoyed how the multi-headed power-ups were handled. It would have been nice if Namco/M2 had.. you know.. included some kind of instructions on what each power-up does. Effort? Pssh. That’s for $40 collections. But, even this has a drawback. In later stages, I felt too many enemies dropped the skulls that downgrade your attack. And it happens right before the final boss. That’s a dick move extraordinaire, and I’ve never seen a shmup that pulls a stunt like that BEFORE THE LAST BOSS! Who is a.. uh.. flasher Dracula that sprays green urine at you.
What the f*ck?
Do you know what’s the oddest thing about Dragon Spirit on the NES for me? Usually, dull but acceptable games that straddle the middle of the pack are the toughest for me to review. In the case of Dragon Spirit, I didn’t really have to stare blankly at the keyboard trying to figure out what to say. The main problem is self-evidence: decent gameplay, horrible presentation. I know the NES has limits, but this feels like total amateur hour stuff. Except the bosses, who look great. Unlike some of the better shmups on the NES, Dragon Spirit feels like it’s treading water getting to those bosses. Shorter stages would have helped too, or just more environmental challenges. Did I have fun? Yes, but the fact that I even had to think about it should tell you this is very faint praise. Verdict: YES! $5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 2
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
First Released July 31, 1989
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Taiji Nagayama and Bishibashi Haro
Evercade: None BUT this could be a killer app for one.
This was among the first console games to satirize movies in set pieces and bosses. Though it’s really obvious why this never came to the United States. The imagery and religious symbols would not fly at all with Nintendo of America for over a decade.
I think Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is the best game in the franchise, though granted, that’s not a high bar to climb. In my limited time with Splatterhouse games, I’ve found them to be all style and no substance. That’s before you get to the mediocre-at-best gameplay. They were shock value for the sake of shock value, back when guts and gore were a big deal in gaming. It’s not anymore, which is why those games can’t survive on their own merit. Wanpaku Graffiti doesn’t have to sweat that. No guts. No gore. Plenty of extreme visuals, sure, but with tongue firmly locked within its cheek. Actually, this looks and feels like a South Park game before South Park was even a thing.
The idea of taking one of THE original M-rated style blood ‘n guts franchises and running it through a Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show filter is just precious. I think it’s actually a shame THIS was the only time Namco did that, too. I really think they could have turned Wanpaku Graffiti into its own sub-franchise and seen a lot of success with it. Same with Konami and its Cute-ifed take on Castlevania: Kid Dracula. Both titles were somewhere between good and great, and neither saw the light of day after the original game (though Kid Dracula appeared on Game Boy as well). Eh, maybe they just didn’t sell? I would *LOVE* to see my friend Sam (aka FreakZone Games, of Angry Video Game Nerd fame) get his hands on either IP. Oh, the things that man could do with them.
I do think fans have overrated Wanpaku Graffiti a tad bit. Oh, I totally had a good time with this, but every time I felt the game was hitting its stride, some massive backwards step would happen and take the game back down the pegs it had climbed, leaving it just a little better than average. Take the combat. The cleaver you use as a weapon is slightly too limited in range. But hey, it’s very satisfying to use and I was thrilled something in this set finally had halfway decent OOMPH. You’ll also occasionally get a shotgun. The shotgun has a heavy recoil on it, so you get blown backwards a tad when you use it. It’s HUGELY satisfying to use the shotty. I wish it showed up more often, and maybe have the option to save the shotgun. Once you pick it up, you don’t switch back to the cleaver until you use up all ten bullets. If you pick up a second shotgun, you don’t go over ten bullets. Annoying, but that’s fine. The combat is fun!
Cleverly, they actually incorporated the recoil into the design. Sometimes you have the boom stick in areas with short platforms that you might fall off of. Or, take this short area in the game pictured here. The bridge crumbles under you, so using the shotgun is a risk because the bridge collapses as you recover from the recoil. I really like that extra layer of thoughtful challenge.
Well, except for the collision detection and the way “blinking” is handled. I wasn’t a fan of the collision boxes at all. Often, it felt like EVERY character had a box as big as the player character, regardless of how big their sprite was on screen. Environmental hazards also seemed to have boxes that were either too big, or your box becomes bigger when you jump. I’m not sure which it is, but I know that judging a safe distance from enemies or spikes is tough and sometimes even inconsistent. The blinking is also very brief and it’s not rare to have to take damage from one thing and immediately get tagged on the recoil by a second or even third thing. It just needed another half-second of blinking to solve this. SO frustrating. And, mind you, this is a game where your primary weapon barely extends from your body. Now, granted, the cleaver’s collision is accurate, but a lot of enemies and around half the bosses encourage you to jump and attack, and that is so much more problematic than it has to be. The perils of an abnormally shaped character on the NES, I suppose, but it always holds Wanpaku Graffiti back from true greatness.
Was “Jumping the Shark” a thing in 1989?
The other major problem with Wanpaku Graffiti is overly-conservative level design. There’s maybe one or two clever bits in the ENTIRE game, such as the shotgun on a bridge bit above.. and really it’s only clever on a situational basis. If you’ve used up all your bullets, then really, it’s just another collapsing bridge segment in a platformer, isn’t it? And that’s a trope about as common as a title screen. While the stages are dressed up to be fun and memorable shout-outs to popular horror movies and franchises, the stages themselves are just a step above bare-bones basic. Don’t get me wrong: it never gets boring, and there’s the occasional mini-bosses to break-up the monotony. Most of the bosses are fun to do battle with, too. Some go a bit overboard on the sponginess. The last boss took so many hits that I wondered if I was actually damaging it or if there was a step I was missing. Other bosses aren’t even bosses, but rather just waves of enemies you have to slay.
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For all its problems, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is easily the best game in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 that wasn’t created specifically for the set. It isn’t MIND BLOWING or anything like that, but it’s a solid hour or two of fun. Stages don’t go too long. The enemy design is really well done (except little scream statues that were SO annoying when their souls come out and hit you almost immediately). While the big set pieces are let down by bland level design that keep this from being an all-timer, it’s also a solid B-game. You know what? Solid B-games have their place in gaming. Some fans said they bought the set for Wanpaku Graffiti alone. While I wouldn’t go THAT far, if Volume 1 costs $5, I could think of a lot worse things you could do with five bucks. Verdict: YES!
WINNER: BEST GAME IN NAMCO MUSEUM ARCHIVES VOLUME 1 $5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1.
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Released June 18, 2020
Developed by M2
Exclusive to Namco Museum Archives Vol 1
Evercade: ☝️
Hey you bitches! I’m high on Pac! Wanna de-make?
Pac-Man Championship Edition is an NES demake of the 2007 Xbox Live Killer App. Like so many people, I loved that game. Eventually, Championship Edition ended up on every platform and ultimately became a +1 for a handful of Pac-Man collections. It revitalized the franchise in a way that 3D platforming games could never have hoped to in a million years. Whether or not it was truly Pac-Man like was another thing. I thought of it as a twitchy action-game based around Pac-Man. This especially came true when DX arrived and the Ghost Train concept was built upon that I never liked that much. I think the peak of the concept was, frankly, the very first Championship Edition. I was very happy to learn that this is specifically a demake of that. No Ghost Trains. Just you, a maze, and a five minute timer. Oh, and it’s an NES game this time.
Some of the level design is beyond ridiculous. By time you reach this point, you’re going too fast to make the type of hairpin turns this requires. You CAN get the hang of it with practice, but these stages will chew you up and spit you out at first. And then your eyeballs have to walk home.
If you’re unfamiliar with the original game, the idea is you have five minutes to eat as many ghosts, items, and dots as humanly possible. The maze is divided into two halves, and when you eat all the dots on one half, one of the items appears on the other side of the screen. Eating the item alters the other half of the maze and reloads its dots, along with power pellets. If you time everything right, you can string together the power pellets and continuously eat ghosts for mega combos. Free-lives are plentiful, and really, it’s you versus the time limit, not the ghosts. After a certain point, you should have such a stockpile of lives that messing up and getting eaten only costs you valuable time. It’s more or less the same game as before, and that comes with all the inherent problems that were there in the original build. When the action gets fierce, the main thing that’ll kill you is not turning the corners fast enough. That, and the lack of online leaderboards, is my only complaint. What a cool idea for a retro collection!
Yep, all the features are here. Well, except the one you’d REALLY want: online leaderboards.
On its own, Pac-Man Championship Edition Demake is a great game. Of course, it had a hell of a template to go off of. You’ve probably played the original to death by now. I didn’t think a demake would feel fresh, but it does. As a nifty little bonus for a ten-game, budget-priced NES collection, it’s nice to have. Of course, if I had to choose, I’d rather they sold this separately and focused on Namco Archives having better menus, more extras, and especially better emulation-based tomfoolery. It’s almost a little annoying that they went the extra-extra-extra mile with two NES demakes, one per collection, both of which are really good when the rest of the collection is such a soulless, lazy cash-in. Originally, I was going to award Volume 1 bonus points for Pac-Man Championship Edition Demake. I want to encourage this type of thing. However, I changed my mind when I thought about it. It really is just a novelty, isn’t it? A nice thing to have, but hardly worth the price of admission alone, and slightly obnoxious in retrospect given that the whole set was cynically phoned-in. Verdict: YES! $5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1
Happy birthday Professor Pac-Man! Tomorrow, August 12, 2023, the game turns forty years old! I know I just said that about Jr. Pac-Man, but the two games came out on consecutive days in the summer of 1983. And wow, if you thought Jr. Pac-Man got a historically raw deal, it’s nothing compared to Professor Pac-Man. This was a massive arcade flop and such a disaster that, of the 400 units Bally Midway manufactured, over 300 were returned. It’s rumored that, when Namco started development of Pac-Land, Midway/Bally asked if they could make it compatible with the returned Professor Pac-Man cabinets, even though they had no joysticks and only two pairs of three buttons. With all those returned units, that means less than 100 units of Professor Pac-Man remain out there somewhere. It’s been forty years. You have to figure around.. what? About half of them broke and were junked, or repurposed without being returned? Forty years is a long time. Six years older than me. I bet half of the 100 survivors were destroyed. Ouch. It’s also the only arcade Pac-Man that never sniffed a home release, or at least the only one that doesn’t have a pinball-shaped tumor growing out of it. It didn’t even get ported to computers, and home computers loved educational games in the 80s. Professor Pac-Man has gone down as something of a joke, even to fans of Pac-Man. And I don’t get why.
“Wait.. Cathy.. did you say EDUCATIONAL GAME?”
Yea, this flashes on the screen when you get a correct answer. It’s quite the eyesore. THANKFULLY, the rest of the game has shockingly beautiful graphics for the era. Probably some 8 bit pixel artwork of the early-to-mid 80s. Yes, really!
I suppose in 1983 this would be labeled more of a “trivia game” which was much more common back in the day. There’s a Trivial Pursuit arcade game. There’s a Name That Tune arcade game with graphics modeled after the 1984 version of the famous game show. I tried them. They suck. Professor Pac-Man or Capcom’s Quiz & Dragons are probably the best arcade trivia games, and honestly, I prefer Professor Pac-Man. However, it’s not really trivia, either. Today, a game like this would be called a “brain training” game. While, yes, it’s set up as a multiple choice “quiz” experience, the questions are brain teasers, not general knowledge. Professor Pac-Man feels exactly like the type of game that would have been a massive, million-selling mega hit on the Nintendo DS in the mid-2000s. I can see you rolling your eyes. Well, I added up the sales for the top “educational” or “brain training” type of games on the DS, and they combined for over 60 million units. Now, look at these screenshots, and other shots in this review.
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Does Professor Pac-Man really seem that different compared to games like Nintendo’s Brain Age or especially Big Brain Academy? Because, the three games from those franchises sold for a combined forty million units by themselves, and that’s just on the Nintendo DS. When you see those numbers, and then experience the actual gameplay of Professor Pac-Man and not just hear about its scathing reputation, you can’t help but wonder if it was ahead of its time. In Professor Pac-Man, you’re given some kind of visual question with three possible answers. The faster you answer, the more points you get. Miss too many times and it’s game over.
The graphics are pretty well detailed for a 1983 game. Nice and colorful. Very underrated presentation does Professor Pac-Man have.
People crap all over Professor Pac-Man, and I don’t get it at all. I’m going to assume they just never played it. Because, not only are the questions genuinely fun to answer, but they offer a satisfying challenge as well. Plus, it’s not like this is some kind of no-frills, bare bones quiz. The graphics are bright, detailed enough for some complex questions, and the game is loaded with personality. Correct answers (and wrong ones as well) always include playful animations. I hate to keep going back to Big Brain Academy, but Professor Pac-Man and it feel like they share some DNA. Of course, this sold 400 units, 300 of which were returned. Big Brain Academy sold over ten million units combined. Six million units on DS, three-and-a-half million on Wii, and another two million for Switch. Proof positive that pioneers get slaughtered while the settlers prosper.
Like Big Brain Academy, this also works pretty dang well as a multiplayer game. Well, as long as one of you doesn’t game over too quickly. Oh, and add the numbers 304 to the start for peak immaturity. You’re welcome.
The word “underrated” doesn’t quite feel strong enough for this release. Professor Pac-Man.. historically vilified, laughing stock of the Pac-Man franchise Professor M. F.’n Pac-Man, is, on the down-low, a very good video game. If you’re into this sort of thing, at least. If the Brain Age or Big Brain or Professor Layton type of stuff didn’t float your boat, nothing here will appeal to you. But, if you’re a fan of any of those, I think you’ll really dig what the Professor offers. There’s a massive variety of questions AND question types. Sometimes you’re trying to determine which object is the mirror image of another. Sometimes you have to observe a scene closely and then answer a question related to it. There’s allegedly over 500 questions, and I have no idea if the game mixes up the order of the multiple choices.
If some of these seem too simple, remember, there’s a timer going too.
Now, Professor Pac-Man does have a couple issues. The biggest one is that the timer starts too quickly. Perfect scores aren’t even possible without blind luck via stabbing one of the three buttons because the timer starts as soon as the answers appear. Since so much of Professor Pac-Man requires visually studying a subject and the choices, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to give players at least a second or two. There’s also the occasional issue with animations that require counting objects (a juggler, for example) going too fast, though I’ll concede that might have been an issue with my emulator. On the other hand, Professor Pac-Man is overflowing with personality. It really reminds me of some of the old educational games for the Apple II my pops or AJ would show me with too much enthusiasm.
After so many rounds, a double-the-points question is asked. Some of them are pretty dang hard, and you don’t get a second chance if you miss.
And that’s Professor Pac-Man. Whether this belonged in arcades in the cocaine-fueled early 80s or not is irrelevant today, since this wouldn’t be in arcades. I have no clue on its current status or who owns the rights, except to say I think it’s a long shot at best that it’ll ever see an official re-release. That just makes me really depressed. It’d be a great fit on Nintendo Switch, Evercade, or hell, even the mobile market. An ideal time waster if you want that wasted time to have an old timey arcade feel. As a very rare historical curio, it would be awesome to add this to a collection. It’d be alongside the games that were loved all along, and maybe finally find an audience. If you’re wondering “who would even think to put something like this in arcades in 1983? It’s so obviously doomed to fail!” that’s still a valid point. One that Bally Midway seems to have grasped to some degree in the first place. Originally, this game was spec’d out without the Pac-Man theme under the name Quiz Ms. Someone at Bally Midway asked the designers to add Pac-Man to it to make it more commercial. Hah. Also, I should point out that Bally Midway didn’t learn their lesson. Remember when I mentioned Trivial Pursuit and Name That Tune earlier? Yea, those were made by Sente, who was bought in 1984 by.. Bally Midway. History is circular.. and yellow and eats ghosts if you get a power pellet.
Professor Pac-Man is Chick-Approved
Professor Pac-Man was developed by Bally Midway
THERE WERE FIVE VERSIONS OF THE TRIVIAL PURSUIT ARCADE GAME! JEEZ!
Happy birthday, Jr. Pac-Man. On August 13, the game turns forty years old!
Jr. Pac-Man hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love in the four decades since its release. In part because Junior was developed by General Computer and not Namco, but big deal! So was Ms. Pac-Man, and that got ported to over twenty-five different platforms. Do you know how many ports Jr. Pac-Man got? Three. It got a couple home computer ports in 1988 and an Atari 2600 port that I covered in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include. After that? Nothing. Oh, plans were made. Like the sublime Atari 5200 port, which could have very well been the best game ever coded for the platform? Along with Super Pac-Man 5200, it didn’t even get released despite being 100% finished. In 2006, Junior was set to be included in a Jakks Pacific plug-and-play centered around the godawful Super Pac-Man, but then things between General Computer and Namco deteriorated and.. well, here we are. Of course, that doesn’t explain why Junior got snubbed BEFORE the bad blood started. The reason typically accepted is Jr. Pac-Man wasn’t as well received by anyone in 1983: operators, players, or critics. It was a bit of a flop, with many fans of Pac-Man feeling it was a vastly inferior sequel. Today, Jr. Pac-Man is banished from gaming’s collective consciousness. And that, my friends, is a bona fide gaming tragedy. This might be the most underrated sequel of the Golden Age of Arcades.
I don’t know why this one hurts more than many others, but it does. There is NO REASON Jr. Pac-Man shouldn’t be a celebrated game today. It’s so good!
If you think Ms. Pac-Man was a big leap over Pac-Man, you wouldn’t believe how big a leap Junior takes. At a whopping seven different mazes, this is the biggest Pac-Man game of the era, by far. Even Pac-Mania sticks to only four mazes. Of course, that’s not the biggest change. Jr. Pac-Man introduced scrolling to the series. This time around, the mazes are the length of two screens, so levels take much longer to finish. Much like Ms. Pac-Man, the mazes are brilliantly designed. Of course they are. Unlike the actual makers of Pac-Man, when it comes to understanding what made Pac-Man successful, developer General Computer f’n GOT IT! That’s why their two Pac-Man sequels, Ms. & Jr., were vastly superior to the first two horrible official sequels Namco put out: Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal. Namco always fixated on the “eating” part of the Pac-Man formula, citing that as being appealing to women which is kind of cringe. I’m pretty sure all sexes.. you know.. eat. I’m not a doctor or a scientist but I’m almost certain eating isn’t specifically a woman thing. On the other hand, General Computer understood that the chase is the exciting part, the turning of the tables on the ghosts is the fun part, and eating is just the means to the end to deliver on those two elements in a fun and exciting way. Namco’s mazes for Pac & Pal and especially Super Pac-Man SUCKED. They weren’t exciting to be chased through. Consequently, they weren’t any fun.
NOM NOM NOM
Like Ms. Pac-Man before it, General Computer optimized Jr. Pac-Man’s mazes to maximize intense chases and nail-biting close calls while still giving players enough different routes to scratch-out distance between you and the ghosts. I’ll never understand why players of the era didn’t embrace Junior. I know arcade operators hated it. Games of Jr. Pac-Man tended to last longer, and longer games means less coin drops. But, I actually think these are the best Pac-Man mazes.. well.. ever! Now, granted, Jr. Pac-Man is missing the warp-tunnels that I usually rely on to shake the ghosts. However, like no other Pac-Man before it, this offers players flexibility to create their own strategies. My longtime readers will note that I put a high premium on that. The key is the addition of Mega Dots. Like Ms. Pac-Man, the bonus items hop around the maze. The twist is, this time around, the items convert standard dots into larger “Mega Dots” that score x5 the points, but at a cost: you pause for a fraction of a second while you eat them. Those fractions add-up and can be costly when there’s a ghost right behind you. It’s a gameplay mechanic that works flawlessly within the established formula, adding both flexibility for players and an even greater sense of tension to an already tense game.
You can see the difference in Mega Dots here. If you’re bold, you can use the strategy of letting the bonus items do their thing. Just, not TOO much, because.. well.. you’ll find out. Plus, you eventually do have to eat those Mega Dots, with all the drawbacks that come with them. It adds a wonderful layer of risk/reward to a game already inherently caked in it.
There’s one other catch to the bonus item/Mega Dot mechanic: if the bonus item reaches one of the Power Pellets, they both blow up, and that power pellet is gone. If you’re chasing high scores, that means you lose the value of the item and as much as 3,000 points from eating the ghosts. Oh, and more importantly, you lose the potential to shake ghosts who are tailing you in that area. So, go ahead, let the bonus item hop around and make tons of Mega Dots. Just beware, because when you reach the sixth and seventh levels of the games, you’re going to need those power pellets. My biggest knock on Jr. Pac-Man.. my only knock, really.. is that, sometimes, it can take a long time to carve out a safe distance from the ghosts. Man, you really miss those warp tunnels when they’re gone. It wasn’t usual for me to need a minute or two to grab the final tiny cluster of dots just because I couldn’t shake my tails. Oh, it’s worth it. Hell, do it just to see the absolutely adorable cut scenes with Junior and Yum-Yum, daughter of Blinky (the red ghost). They have a crush on each-other. Awwww. Seriously, I want a game starring these two. They’re so cute together!
Junior and Blinky’s daughter, Yum-Yum, are precious. This is the first time I actually enjoyed the cut-scenes in any classic Pac-Man, though I wish they’d stop looping after you’ve seen them. They even work the story into the game. The level after Junior gives Yum-Yum a balloon, the level’s item is a balloon! Actually, it is a bit messed up that the Pac-Family eat the ghosts, and then Blinky named his daughter Yum-Yum. It would be like living next to a family of cannibals and naming your children “Steak” and “Hamburger.”
The story of Junior’s development is every bit as fascinating as the game itself. Like, I thought the General Computer guys were geniuses for coming up with the mega dots. Guess what? They were already in the original Pac-Man game code. So are the Galaxian-like explosion graphics when one of the bonus items hits a power pellet. Yea, really. Apparently, GCC didn’t know exactly why they were there or what they were for. You can still give them credit for how they used them. The race-against-the-items or the mega dots slowing you down? You know.. the good stuff that makes Jr. Pac-Man so unique and exciting? That was all them. I wish they hadn’t gotten out of the game business. With the possible exception of the Pac-Man Championship Edition series (and Shigeru Miyamoto’s Pac-Man Vs.), there hasn’t been a truly great Pac-Man game in the years since. And, really, those Championship games aren’t truly maze-chases. They’re action games set in a maze. So, in this humble gamer’s opinion, the greatest makers of genuine Pac-Man games quit making games years ago. And that is a damn shame, folks.
General Computer, you sadistic bastards! This is the final maze of Jr. Pac-Man, and it’s a doozy. Look at that design of the corner. But, you know what? It works. It’s exciting, and fair. The means to shake the ghosts is right there.
A tiff seemed to have formed between GCC and Namco. AtGames is involved now too somehow and Namco has said “Ms. Pac-Man? The popular gaming mascot of the 80s and the rare example of a franchise that produced two instant global icons? Yea, never heard of her. It’s Pac-Mom in our games. M-O-M!” I don’t know if AtGames is tiffing with Namco or if the two sides simply can’t come to terms on allowing these games to be re-released. I do know that Jr. Pac-Man deserves better than the non-legacy it has. I really do wish all parties could all come together and work this out. Not only are they leaving money on the table, but games like Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, and yes, even Professor Pac-Man, deserve to be celebrated today. Jr. Pac-Man, especially. Everybody knows about the greatness of Ms. Pac-Man, but Junior came out right as the bottom was falling out in arcades. He didn’t get a kajillion ports before all the rights holders started getting snippy with each-other. It’s heartbreaking, because this is a really amazing game. Not just a great Pac-Man game, but maybe.. just maybe.. the BEST Pac-Man. The all-time classic that never was, and the perfect cap to what should be a celebrated TRILOGY of games. My Dad said it best: it would be like if you couldn’t include Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi with Star Wars anymore just because those films had different directors. Jr. Pac-Man is forty years old now. Can y’all bury the hatchet already? Not in each-other, I mean.
Jr. Pac-Man is Chick-Approved
Jr. Pac-Man was developed by General Computer Corporation
Mickey Mouse
Roger Rabbit
Donald Duck
Mickey Mousecapade
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Alpine Ski
Chack’n Pop
Elevator Action
The Fairyland Story
Front Line
Halley’s Comet
The Ninja Warriors
Qix
Space Seeker
Wild Western
Galaga
Battle City
Pac-Land
Dig Dug II
Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo
Mappy-Land
Legacy of the Wizard
Rolling Thunder
Dragon Buster II: Yami no Fūin
Mendel Palace
Gaplus
Mendel Palace (Vol 2)
Dig Dug (Vol 1)
Battle City (Vol 2)
Galaxian
Pac-Man
Xevious
Mappy
Dig Dug
The Tower of Druaga
Sky Kid
Dragon Buster
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Professor Pac-Man is Chick-Approved
Jr. Pac-Man hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love in the four decades since its release. In part because Junior was developed by General Computer and not Namco, but big deal! So was Ms. Pac-Man, and that got ported to over twenty-five different platforms. Do you know how many ports Jr. Pac-Man got? Three. It got a couple home computer ports in 1988 and an Atari 2600 port that I covered in 
Jr. Pac-Man is Chick-Approved
Indie Gamer Chick 
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