This review would not have been possible without Chad Birch’s excellent write-up on Pac-Man’s ghosts. A must-read that helped me to better appreciate what Pac-Man accomplished. And I’d like to also give a shout out to the inspiration of that post, the Pac-Man Dossier by Jamie Pittman. If you’ve never read about the ghost patterns in Pac-Man, do me a favor: read those, then play Pac-Man and tell me if the experience feels somehow changed to you. It’s the strangest thing but it feels transformative. I’ve never experienced that before with any game. It’s wild.
Pac-Man Platform: Arcade Released May 22, 1980 Designed by Toru Iwatani Published by Namco Arcade Archives Release Included in Pac-Man Museum+ Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
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I was born in 1989, and I started gaming regularly when I got a PlayStation for Christmas in 1996. Pac-Man had seen better days by that point. It wasn’t an important character to my childhood at all. Not even a little bit. I’m sure my older readers will have an aneurysm hearing that, but it’s true. I did play Pac-Man games, of course. Soon after I got that PlayStation, but before I got the Nintendo 64 for my 9th birthday in July, 1998 that changed my life and really made gaming my thing, my father got me a pair of the original Namco Museum releases for my PlayStation. Volumes 1 & 3, aka the ones that everyone had. I don’t remember playing most of the thirteen games in them, but I know for certain I only played Pac-Man once. Why on Earth would I want to play that boring old version when Ms. Pac-Man had four mazes and bonus fruits that hopped around the mazes instead of just sitting there lifelessly in the center? To 7 year old me, the original world-conquering Pac-Man held no appeal at all. I’m not proud to say that I stuck to my guns on that long after I had launched Indie Gamer Chick in 2011. Pac-Man? Boring! I didn’t change my tune on it until last summer, when my sister asked me pointedly “how is Pac-Man’s one maze any different from pinball? You wouldn’t complain that a pinball table plays the same game, and only that one game.” I couldn’t believe how ashamed of myself I was at that moment. She was completely right, and I had always been completely wrong about Pac-Man.
Few things in life are so satisfying as the 4th chomp of a single power pellet. And yes, I’m playing with five lives instead of three.
The weird thing is, I kept that bias against the original Pac-Man despite taking the time to better understand the maze chase genre as a whole. It was the Atari 2600 port (which is one of several Pac-Reviews in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include), along with my fandom of games like Popeye and Jr. Pac-Man that helped me to figure out why some games succeed and others fail. It’s all about the chase itself. Not the collecting, or the turning the tables on the enemies, or even the presentation and/or theme of the whole package. The entertainment comes mostly from the close calls and exhilaration you get from scratching out just enough distance to free yourself, or just barely beating out a chaser hot on your heels to win a level. Being charming, looking good, or having memorable characters is nice, but if the chase is no good, it doesn’t matter. I never understood why Pac-Man succeeded where so many others failed, but the really weird thing is neither did Namco, or the man who made Pac-Man to begin with.
There’s so many idiosyncrasies that make Pac-Man.. well, Pac-Man that I couldn’t possibly count them all. For example, the places where I’ve put the arrows are known as “blind alleys.” The ghosts can NEVER travel upward along those specific paths. They can go down, but never up. If you perform it right, you can even park in the lower right hand blind alley and remain safe. The ghosts will never find you. Pros use this to take potty breaks (though the use of this is controversial).
Look at many interviews with Toru Iwatani and he’s sure to conclude that people relate to Pac-Man.. especially women.. because Pac-Man, you know, eats. Eating! That’s a thing people do! Especially us women folk, whereas men are too busy for that, what with all the bread winning, and usually opt instead for good old fashioned photosynthesis. Of course, other games are about eating too, but only Pac-Man became a global icon. Or maybe it was the shape, serendipitously created (discovered?) when Iwatani took a single wedge from a piece of pizza? Or the name, which was originally “Puck-Man” until someone turned the P into an F and Namco had second thoughts. Or was it the ghosts? The colorful, menacing pursuers that were each programmed to have their own personalities? The sound effects? Sure, those all matter, but I think if you leave everything the same but have a crappy maze design and Pac-Man doesn’t blow up like it did. The straightaways at the bottom are the exact right length to make players hold their breaths. There’s no unreasonable twisty-turny moments. The ghosts slowing down in the tunnels lends an almost Hanna-Barbera vibe to the chase where you can imagine the ghosts shaking their fists at you in anger as the distance between you and them increases. The eating part is also only exciting because, YOU GUESSED IT, its effect on the chase. Eating dots slows you down, and there’s so many dots! That’s a lot of space where you aren’t going your max speed. The maze is, frankly, kind of perfect.
My best 5 man game.
My best 3 man game.
Namco figured everything was responsible for Pac-Man’s success, except the maze itself. There, their attitude seemed to be “any maze will do!” They went on to prove this twice in a row. The next Pac-Man game THEY made, Super Pac-Man, turned the abstract dots into the type of food us eating eaters eat. In theory, if eating is the appeal, it should have been a big hit, but it wasn’t. Maybe because the game itself sucked, mostly because the maze sucked. It didn’t lend itself perfectly to the best moments in maze chases. Scratching out distances, close calls, and nail-biting sections? Nope, just a mess of walls and dots with no rhyme or reason. Then they repeated the same folly with Pac & Pal. For all I know, the base concept of those games might be ingenious, but with the mazes they feature, there’s no way to know for sure. I kind of wish a ROM hack existed that changed the mazes. Weirdly, it was a rogue “enhancement board” developer named General Computer that fundamentally got it with Pac-Man and made the best of those early sequels: Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man.
Pac-Man is one of the first cases of the original Japanese script having helpful tips that were lost in translation. Specifically Pinky being “Speedy.” In fact, Pinky doesn’t move faster, but the word for what it meant didn’t have a perfect one-to-one English translation. In Japan, its name is “Machibuse” which roughly means “to ambush” or “being ambushed.” Unlike some bad translations, it’s not a stretch to see how they reached for a word that conveys the concept of an ambush and came up with “Speedy.” The “speedy one” is usually the one ahead, right? Pinky’s attack logic is to use the direction Pac-Man is facing and target an area roughly four lengths ahead of Pac-Man. Clyde (the orange one) is in the same boat. “Pokey” is his name in the US. WTF does that even mean? In Japan, his name translates to “feigning ignorance.”
If the maze design itself is the most important aspect, the chasers are a very close second. When I play a maze chase for the first time, sometimes I need time to figure out if a maze works or not. That’s rarely the case with chasers. If they just immediately make a beeline for you, it’s usually not a good sign. Pac-Man doesn’t do that, and I think that factored really big into why it took off. While the ghosts each have a unique personality and accompanying attack method, all four ghosts collectively run on three “modes” that apply at the same time to all four. The modes are called SCATTER, CHASE, and FRIGHTENED. The main two are SCATTER and CHASE, which run on a fixed timer, with SCATTER running much shorter. Sometimes astronomically shorter. CHASE can last seventeen minutes before giving players another SCATTER, though by that point, you’ll probably just finish the level or die. In SCATTER, each ghost goes to their own designated corner to wander on “patrol” for a few seconds. In CHASE, the ghosts each have a strategy based on using a “target” on the board that refreshes every step they take. The red one always targets the space Pac-Man is currently occupying and takes the shortest route to get there, leading to it feeling like it chases you the most directly. The pink one tries to anticipate your move by targeting four spaces in front of the direction you’re facing. You can use this to scare Pinky off. If you’re near a junction and you move straight at him, his target tile will be BEHIND HIM and cause him to change directions. It works every single time.
The blue ghost bases its position on Blinky (the red one) and Pac-Man’s position, and if Blinky closes in on you, it’s not rare for Inky to be close by. Finally, Clyde, the orange one, really is kind of a coward. If he’s far away from Pac-Man, he uses Blinky’s targeting system, but as soon as he gets within eight spaces of Pac-Man, he retreats to the left hand corner using the same target tile as his SCATTER mode target. While he’s not specifically dangerous as he doesn’t target you, what he’s really doing is cutting off a potential means of escape. There’s a LOT more complexity. Like seriously, read this and try committing it to memory. I made it to Chapter 3 and about two minutes later, as I tried making sense of which tile counted and how each frame of animation mattered a great deal, my ears started dripping blood. I took it as a sign to stop and just enjoy knowing that I could stare-down the pink ghost.
The ghosts in their “SCATTER” patrol zones.
I was wrong about Pac-Man being boring. Now that I approach it the same way I do a pinball table, knowing that I’m playing one specific maze that operates under one specific set of rules, I think I kind of love this game. Maybe someday, I’ll even commit the professional patterns to memory. Right now, I’m just content to practice and get better at anticipating the moves of the ghosts and utilizing it to make the type of moves I once thought were bold, but now I know are completely safe. Besides, I kind of like how good I am at it now, where scoring a 1,600 point 4th chomp is still a big deal to me. I don’t know if I ever want to cross that threshold where scoring 50,000 points isn’t a “good game” anymore. There’s something comforting about knowing just enough about Pac-Man to do alright, but not enough that I could play it for hours, completely zoned out. It’s a game I have to pay attention to, and that’s kind of what I want out of a maze chase anyway. If I reached the point where my brain is calculating what frame cycle I’m currently in so I can pinpoint exactly what direction the edible ghosts will turn, that doesn’t sound as fun for me. Hey, 50,000 is a good score for me. It’s a pitiful score for pros. But I bet I’m the one having more fun. Verdict: YES!
Pac-Man Plus Platform: Arcade Released March, 1983 Published by Bally Midway Included in Arcade1Up’sPac-Man Deluxe Cabinet NO MODERN NON-ARCADE1UP RELEASE
Original Pac-Man Maze
Pac-Man Plus Maze
Pac-Man Plus is the unofficial-official ROM hack that DIDN’T find its audience. It’s unclear how involved Namco was. MobyGames says it was completely unauthorized by Namco. The Pac-Man Wiki says it was actually made by Namco. Everyone seems to agree that Plus was commissioned by Bally Midway to compete with the prevalence of popular-but-unauthorized enhancement kits and ROM hacks (some of which I reviewed in Pac-Man Museum: The Games They Couldn’t or Wouldn’t Include), the most famous being one that just sped up the game significantly. While Plus retains the same maze as the original Pac-Man, the gameplay is fairly heavily modified. Oh, and the maze is teal now. My father speculated teal might be kinder on CRT monitors than the stark blue of the original. Real life Pac-Man cabinets are NOTORIOUS for permanently searing the maze’s shapes and features into the monitors themselves. By 1983, enough Pac-Man units were probably experiencing monitor-scaring that arcade operators requested that it, you know, not do that anymore. That’s just my pops’ speculation, though. Another cosmetic change is that the first item is a can of Coca-Cola, which is apparently one of the first examples of product placement in a video game. Also, when you eat a power pellet, the ghosts now have stems on their head. It seems like a needlessly cruel reminder that, yes, they’re food now. As if being dead isn’t bad enough. The cosmetic changes are fine and honestly, the stem-head thing is cute, but gameplay is king.
“Aww sh*t. We’re food. Wait, how did ole Pinky not change?”
There are three notable changes to the standard Pac-Man gameplay. (1) The ghosts are “more aggressive” now, by which it means they spend less time in the “Scatter” algorithm and more time in “Chase.” They also move faster, but then again, so do you. (2) The power pellets are now red kryptonite instead of green. In other words, you never know what will happen. Sometimes you’ll get the standard “all four ghosts can be eaten” from the first game, but sometimes the power pellets only work on three of the four ghosts. When this happens, one ghost seemingly chosen at random will not be affected. What the hell? Well, this is “professional-proofing.” You see, by 1983, the patterns that skilled players used to manipulate the ghosts and rack up high scores were widely known. Instead of creating new “marching orders” for the four ghosts, having one not become vulnerable completely wrecks the established patterns used by pros. Oh, you can still use patterns, but you will also always need to think on your feet. Other effects also include making the ghosts invisible, making the stage invisible, and making the stage AND the remaining dots/pellets invisible. Because OF COURSE that happens.
Well, it wouldn’t be a mod of an established game from the early 80s if “invisibility” wasn’t one of its tricks.
(3) The bonus items aren’t just for points anymore. They’re functionally extra power pellets. Not just power pellets, but SUPER INVISIBILITY Power Pellets! When you eat them, the ghosts become edible, but they turn invisible (facepalm) until the blinking starts. If you eat them, they score double the points they normally do: 400, 800, 1600, 3200. Being able to fully utilize this requires you to have a fairly good understanding of the behavior of the ghosts running the “FRIGHTENED” algorithm, since you won’t be able to eyeball which direction they take. Wait, how does FRIGHTENED work? Oh, the directions the ghosts turn are based on a pseudo-random number generator. Well crap. So unless you memorize the frame-by-frame gameplay to be able to predict the behaviors of the ghosts, chomping them with the item is pure luck. Anyway, I played Pac-Man Plus a few years ago and I didn’t really like it all that much, but now that I’ve taken the time to understand the idiosyncrasies of Pac-Man, actually.. it’s okay! It’s not an amazing upgrade. It’s fine, but it is something you have to be really into Pac-Man to appreciate. I can also understand why purists wouldn’t like it. I had a decent enough time messing around with it, but it’s no surprise why Ms. Pac-Man is the official-unofficial ROM hack that became a hit and Pac-Man Plus was relegated to the status of historic curio. Verdict: YES!
Ignore the “high score” which was done via cheating tomfoolery. This was my legitimate high score.
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
Pac-Man
Pac-Man Plus
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
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