Rampart/Gauntlet
GBA (2004)

Gauntlet will be forever imbedded in my mind as the first four-player cooperative quarter eater. From the day I first saw it way back in seventh grade, the game has always held a special place in my heart. At least that’s the story I told my wife as I was moving a vintage Gauntlet arcade cabinet into our home gameroom.

DSI’s port of Gauntlet to the Gameboy Advance is surprisingly good. The speech samples, the sound effects, and graphics are all on par with the original. In fact, the Gameboy version’s only two flaws come from porting the game to a Gameboy. One, the game’s entire structure (insert quarters for more life) has never worked on home consoles, and it doesn’t work here either. Some versions allow you to insert virtual coins to add as much health as you want; this version doesn’t allow for any additional coins, although you are allowed to continue after dying. Fortunately the game starts players out with 10,000 health, which should be more than enough for almost any gaming session. The other problem comes from taking one of the arcade’s most famous multiplayer games and turning it into a single-player game. While the game is certainly playable in single-player mode, it’s not nearly as much fun. Other than that, the only thing conspicuously missing is the between-level music.

Rampart is a completely different style of game from Gauntlet. I fell in love with the game’s combination of strategy and action the first time I played it in the arcade, and ever since it’s held a special place in my heart. At least that’s the story I told my wife as I was moving a vintage Rampart arcade cabinet into our home gameroom. I have a very loving and understanding wife.

Rampart consists of two different game sequences. After choosing a castle to defend, you’ll have to fire you castle’s cannons at a fleet of ships that are firing back at you as well. Each well-placed shot from an enemy takes a randomly sized chunk out of your castle’s outer perimeter. This phase of the game takes place for around a minute. Once completed, you’ll get a short amount of time to rebuild your castle. I’ve always felt this phase of the game resembled Tetris. The game hands you randomly sized and shaped pieces that must be rotated and used to repair the damage to your wall. If you do not completely repair the damage to your castle before the timer expires, the game is over. Repair your castle and the game continues. There are also other castles near yours that can also be encapsulated. As you expand your territory you’ll earn additional cannons, which means more firepower in the wartime rounds. The game continues until you fail to repair your castle’s walls, or you destroy all the enemies and move to the next round.

The original arcade version of Rampart used a trackball controller. The game was later converted to work with joysticks, but it always worked best with the original trackball system. That becomes the weakest link in Rampart’s own defenses; controlling your cannon’s aim accurately and sinking enemy boats is nearly impossible because the cursor simply moves way too quickly. Other than that, everything else is great. Rampart is probably DSI’s most accurate arcade translation to date.

Rally Speedway
C64, Commodore Business Machines (1984)

Rally Speedway is one of those games that is more fun than it probably should be. The goal of this simple top-down racing game is to complete laps with the fastest lap time possible. Despite the fact that the game features tons of tweakable variables and sports both one and two player modes, it’s probably best remembered as, “the game where your poor guy catches on fire.”

In one-player mode, there are no opponents to race against — it’s you against the clock. Using the game’s default control scheme, forward accelerates, left and right steer, and the button mashes the brakes — that last one is most important, as you’ll need to ride the brakes long and hard to make even the most gradual turns without exploding into a fiery death.

For the most part your car stays in the center of the screen and rotates while the track itself spins and scrolls by. The penalty for leaving the race track is sudden death — any collision with a house or tree causes your car to explode in flames. And yes, occasionally your driver will catch on fire as well, forcing him to stop, drop and roll before waving his arms wildly at you.

By default your car’s top speed is 60mph, but that can be bumped all the way up to 200mph. At 60mph I had trouble making turns without riding the brakes constantly, and at 200mph the game lasts merely seconds between crashes. Trust me — the trees won’t know what hit ’em.

From the main menu, players can configure road conditions (dry, wet or icy), top speed (40, 60, 100, 150 or 200), and acceleration speeds (slow, normal, or fast). You can also choose between “real life” (the normal setting) and “only in a computer”, which turns off all sprite collection detection and lets racers drive across houses, trees, and swimming pools.

In two-player mode, you and a friend can race one another at the same time. If one player leaves the other behind, a five-second penalty is awarded to the slower racer, and the cars are lined up again. This happens frequently — expect a normally 90-second track to take five or more minutes to complete in two-player mode.

Rally Speedway also allows gamers to create, load and save new tracks. The map editor is joystick driven and odd-looking at first, but with just a few minutes players will be able to create their own tracks, which are easily traded between racers.

There’s not much to Rally Speedway, but that’s part of what makes it so enjoyable. Once you memorize the basic tracks it’s fun to see just how quickly you can zip around them (fastest times are saved), and with a friend you can get some serious head-to-head competition on.

Playboy: The Mansion
PS2/Xbox (2005)

Videogames give us the gift of escape. By simply turning on our favorite console and picking up a controller, we can forget who we are during the day and temporarily become a fighter pilot, or a Navy Seal, or a medieval warrior, or whoever you wish to become. Games like The Sims and The Urbz have taken this concept one step further, by allowing gamers to portray another person altogether in a “life simulator” of sorts. The latest game in this “real life” genre is Playboy: The Mansion, a game that gives gamers the opportunity to become Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire.

Presented in the now familiar Sims-pseudo-3dish point of view, gamers assume the role of Hugh Hefner, playboy extraordinaire. The long-term goal of the game is to build the Playboy Empire to the huge success that it has become in real life. To do that, you’ll need to complete all the tasks assigned to you throughout the game, from making business contacts to scheduling photo shoots to schmoozing rock stars in hopes of landing them for an interview in next month’s magazine. And, along the way, you’ll throw a ton of parties and have a lot of virtual sex.

Throwing parties in Playboy: The Mansion is a requirement. After picking the time of day, the dress code, and who’s on the invite list, Hugh’s pad will soon be hoppin’ with some of the biggest-breasted pixels you’ve ever seen. Each person you meet in the game can be engaged. While talking with them you’ll see a meter that shows your relationship levels with each person in the areas of relationship, business, and romance. While talking with NPCs, you can select how to steer the conversation by clicking on such bubbles as “talk business”, “flirt”, or “tell a secret”. Each choice moves one of the three meters either up or down. As the meters move, different choices become available. Compliment leads to Flirt; Flirt leads to Hug; Hug leads to Kiss; Kiss leads to Make Out; Make Out leads to Sex on the Couch. During Sex on the Couch, your female visitors will drop their tops and perform a weird kind of lap dance, complete with lots of giggling and jiggling and PS2 controller vibration.

The bigger goal in Playboy: The Mansion is to put your monthly magazine. By inviting the right people to the right parties, you’ll begin making business associates. You’ll need to hire photographers, authors, and interviewees, as well as hot virtual ladies in order to get your magazine off the ground. Once you get your centerfold picked you’ll need to schedule a photo shoot, a process that involves picking outfits, locations, and even snapping the sexy pictures yourself.

As your magazines begin to roll off the presses, the money will start coming in. You’ll use your growing income to buy amenities for the mansion and hire bigger and better staff members. Of course the more money you have, the bigger your parties will be, which ultimately means the more people you’ll be able to have sex with.

So with all the sex, parties, and virtual boobies contained within Playboy: The Mansion, what’s wrong with the game? Unfortunately, plenty.

For starters, moving around within the mansion is often a pain in the butt. It’s too easy to get trapped between a piece of furniture and a Playboy bunny standing around having a drink. In fact, a lot of the character sprite-collision system is wonky. Often times when you’re making out with one of your cyber-honeys, your arms will burst out through her chest like some sort of strange horror film. And if you think that’s weird, just wait until you make Hef try to get up after having sex – half the time the woman of your dreams will stay where she is, dry humping your expensive furniture long after you’ve left the area.

Of course the biggest problem with Playboy: The Mansion isn’t the collision detection; it’s that it gets boring, really quickly. Once you’ve humped all your party guests and staff members, all that’s left to do is work on the magazine. This stays pretty boring, as hiring people and wooing famous celebrities to your magazine gets pretty monotonous. Of course this is done by inviting them to your parties, where they get to stand around and watch you have sex on the couch with your staff members. And so on and so forth.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it’s a heck of a gig to have in real life, but if I’m going to play a videogame and fantasize about being someone else for a while, I’d rather be Luke Skywalker, or Dirk the Daring, or even Mario than Hugh Hefner. I don’t need to be reminded that it’s Friday night and the only boobs I’ll be seeing tonight are virtual ones.

Playboy: The Mansion feels more like a nudity hack for The Sims than a game worthy of the white bunny’s approval. It’s certainly not dirty or interesting enough to keep older gamers’ interests, and yet it’s a bit too risqué for younger gamers. That leaves … nobody, which is who I predict will be playing this game a year from now.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Xbox (2005)

I never realized this before just now — Sid Meier’s Pirates! is the original Grand Theft Auto. Think about it. You cruise around in your boat, you shoot other people’s boats, you create a gang of not-so-nice people, and you take other people’s turf. Sure, you use boats instead of cars and drink ale instead of hot coffee (cough), but Sid Meier’s Pirates! for the Xbox takes the open-ended adventure feeling from GTA and brings it back to where it all started — the open seas.

Pirates!, written by Sid Meier and published by MicroProse, first appeared on home computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II way back in 1987. A port of the game was released for the NES in 1991, and an enhanced version, Pirates! Gold, appeared on many platforms, including the CD32, Genesis, Amiga and PC.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!, now available for the Xbox, is essentially the same game it was almost two decades ago. Like the original (and Grand Theft Auto, for that matter), the game is completely open ended. Whether you decide to follow the game’s suggestions is entirely up to you. Sure, you *could* seek revenge against the Spaniards who wronged your family — or, you could simply sit around, shooting ships as they sail by in the ocean blue and acquiring food, treasure and a crew as you come across them.

Once you’ve decided to which country your loyalty lies, the real game begins as you seek out ships from other lands and blow the crap out of them — hey, you are a nasty pirate after all, right? As you stop in various ports across the land, you can do things like recruit new members for your crew or buy items. As you work your way up through the ranks, you’ll spend time taking down enemies and dancing with various ladies across the land. Did I just say dancing? Yes, alongside your handiwork with a blade and your navigation skills, you’ll have to perfect your dance moves in order to win friends, influence people, and get financial backing.

The rest of the adventure is up to you. You’ll have to decide whether you wish to avenge your family, become a treasure hunter or an explorer, or become the finest dancer in the land — and who knows, maybe you’ll do all three! Sid Meier, author of such games as Civilization, Colonization, Railroad Tycoon and Alpha Centauri, understands where the fun in gaming lies — not in complex controls, but in allowing the gamer to go on an adventure. Sid Meier’s Pirates! is an open ended game which throws dozens of potential missions and goals at you at once and tempts you with tons of unlockable features. There is no “beating” of this game, only the retiring of one pirate and the birth of another. It’s addictive, it’s fun, and it’s highly recommended.

Park Patrol
C64, Activision (1985)

In Activision’s Park Patrol, you play the role of a litter-collecting park ranger. Your goal is to keep your lakefront property clean by picking up litter (cans and bottles). To do that you’ll need to use your handy-dandy motorized raft to pick up the trash floating in the lake, and run as quickly as possible to clean up debris lying on the shore itself.

Of course, you won’t be alone in the water. Snakes, swimmers and other obstacles will be floating along side you. While snakes and swimmers will poke a hole in your raft and sink more than your hopes of winning, hitting the end of a log will jettison you straight up in the air. If you can pull it off, you can land on top of the log and start running lumberjack-style in order to gain bonus points. If not, it’s glub glub glub, bub.

The shore is no picnic either, with turtles and ants constantly nipping at your heels. If a turtle happens to slip off the shore and fall into the water, you can take it out of commission by running over them in your raft. Likewise, dropping one of your limited snake repellant pills into the lake can dissipate any snakes in your immediate area. You’ll also have to keep an eye on those swimmers – occasionally one will start drowning, and it’ll be up to you to rescuer him (yeah, the same swimmers that will try and kill you. That’s gratitude for you).

You’ll have to do all of this while racing the clock as well. The park ranger has a hut on the shore where you can duck in and get some more time (think “air” in the swimming level of Jungle Hunt), but it won’t be easy running past all those land critters.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this game. The graphics are cute and enjoyable, and the musical tunes played throughout the game gives each level a bit of personality. A built in level editor in the menu allows players to set the difficulty of each level (and even choose between a boy or a girl ranger), something that was pretty uncommon back in those days. Park Patrol is what classic gaming is all about to me – a fun little platformer with bright graphics, happy music and lots of action.

Paperboy / Rampage
GBA (2004)

In both Paperboy and Rampage, you can break glass. I had to think a long time to come with something these two games have in common, and other than both currently being owned by Midway, that’s all I could come up with. Despite the unlikely pairing, both games were fun in the arcade and remain fun on the Gameboy Advance.

In Paperboy, players must guide a bike-peddling newspaper delivery boy through what can only be described as the world’s most dangerous neighborhood. If the inattentive drivers and open manholes weren’t bad enough, this particular street has roving lawnmowers, rabid dogs and a full roster of characters and obstacles that would send most newspaper boys straight to the unemployment line. Your goal is to pick up bundles of newspapers and throw them into the mailboxes of your subscribers. Miss a house and they’ll drop your services; hit all of them, and you’ll pick up new customers. The game ends when you loose all your Paperboys, lose all your subscribers, or make it through all seven days without dying.

One of the most challenging things about playing Paperboy was that due to the games isometric presentation, the area where your Paperboy resides is actually a small corner of the screen. This problem is multiplied on the Gameboy Advance’s small screen. The small play area means problems will present themselves quickly and often, testing your reflexes constantly. The original game’s controls (which were included on a real pair of bicycle handlebars) ported over nicely to the GBA; A pedals, B brakes, and either trigger button tosses newspapers. Many of the game’s speech samples made it to the conversion, and the original music, while simplified, is also there. The game’s only major annoyance is that your bicycle constantly drifts to the right, making “going straight” a constant battle.

Rampage, in contrast, is much simpler. After choosing the mutant of your choice (King Kong, Godzilla, or the Wolf Man), the goal of Rampage is to simply tear stuff up. Smash buildings, bash cars, and eat anyone who gets in your way. Each mutant has a stamina meter that goes down as your take damage; lose all your stamina and it’s goodnight, Gracie.

This version of Rampage has been watered down slightly. Kicking has been removed from your monster’s repertoire, while punching and jumping have been retained. Destroying the buildings seems to be easier in this port, although that may be intentional as the original videogame allowed three players to team up against cities. As with Paperboy some of the sound effects and graphics have been watered down, but there’s so much going on in Rampage that it doesn’t take away from the overall experience.

Need for Speed: Carbon
Xbox (2006)

Need For Speed Carbon, the latest entry in Electronic Arts’ popular racing franchise, picks up where last year’s Need For Speed Most Wanted left off. More than just a “carbon” copy, the most recent Need For Speed game tweaks the franchise formula by adding several new options and features, resulting in a slightly different (but equally fun) racing experience.

The perpetually dark Palmont City is a stark contrast to the autumn backdrop of Most Wanted’s Rockport City. Urban streets and neon lights have replaced last year’s rustling leaves and rural landscapes. Palmont is divided into four territories, each of which is then subdivided into smaller counties. Initially rival gangs control the territories, but it’ll be your job to take them over one county (and race) at a time. In between races a mysterious back-story unfolds, delivered through Need For Speed’s patented (and somewhat creepy) mesh of CGI filters placed over live actors. The story, with a plot as deep as most episodes of Scooby Doo, involves a bag of money getting switched, a double-cross, and (thankfully) a lot of racing.

Most of the racing formats have carried over from the previous game: circuit races, sprints, checkpoints and speed traps are all back. The clunky drag-racing event from last year’s game has thankfully been dropped and replaced with drifting. In drifting races, the object is to slide your way around a course, scoring points along the way. The closer to the wall and the longer you stay there, the more points you’ll rack up. By linking drifts together you can add score multipliers, but spin out or tap the wall and your drift is over. The physics and control inside drift races are so different from the rest of the game that they almost feel like a completely separate mini-game.

After taking over an entire territory players will face one of the game’s gang leaders on a one-on-one duel. Boss races occur in two stages, the first of which is a routine sprint race where you’ll take on the boss heads up through his or her own city. The second part is a two-part race through Carbon Canyon. The first time through, you’ll chase your opponent down winding canyon roads, earning points by how closely you can trail your opponent without bumping their car. Once you reach the end it’s back to the top for a second run, this time with you in the lead. The goal is to reach the end of the run while maintaining a positive score. Without nitrous or your friends to help you, later runs through the canyon will put your ultimate driving skills to the test. One wide turn on a tight canyon corner and you’ll achieve massive airtime the hard way.

To appease old school, new school, and wishful-thinking racers, Carbon’s cars have been divided into three categories (muscle cars, tuners, and exotics) with three escalating performance tiers. Players begin with a couple of tier one cars from each category to choose from, but can unlock others by winning races. Performance items can be won, unlocked or purchased and installed on your ride, but eventually you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier car to continue your winning streak.

Carbon ups the car customization ante with the addition of Autosculpting, which allows gamers to not only apply different body kits to their cars, but also mix and match kit pieces to create entirely new looks. There are literally hundreds of flames, vinyl stripes, tribal designs, and other symbols that can be added your car, each of which can be then rotated, skewed, or repositioned. Along with all the wheels, spoilers, hoods, roof scoops, muffler tips, paint colors and schemes, ride heights, and dozens of other parts that can be added to your car, the possibilities are infinite. Each car tier also has half a dozen performance mods that can be unlocked and purchased, from turbo and nitrous to brakes and suspensions. Each performance piece contains adjustment sliders that allow gamers to adjust each part, so you can do things like configure your nitrous to either last longer, or blow harder. True gearheads will no doubt get a kick out of constantly tweaking their rides.

The biggest difference racers will encounter in game is the addition of wingmen (and wingwomen, for that matter). Hirable teammates can be unlocked, hired and fired at different points throughout the game. Crew members come in three flavors: drafters that can lead you through races at record speeds, scouts who will drive ahead revealing track shortcuts, and blockers who’ll smash into your rivals’ rides, giving you an opportunity to take the lead in the process. As helpful as they may sound, EA’s implementation of wingmen is done so awkwardly that your “friends” more often than not cause you to lose races instead of helping you win them. The drafters are the least useful of the bunch – they’re great on straight-aways, but will unfailingly lead you crashing into a corner headfirst at breakneck speeds. Blockers aren’t bad early in the game, but you’ll soon find they rarely have enough nitrous to hang with the pack, resulting in a continual barrage of “I can’t keep up!” from your sidekick. Scouts are probably the most helpful with their ability to point out all the game’s hidden back alleys and shortcuts, but even they have a way of inadvertently hitting the brakes and smashing into your car or even running you off the road and into a wall as your opponents sail by, laughing.

The only major disappointment Carbon delivers is the de-emphasis on police chases, particularly in career mode. Police chases are no longer missions of their own, and escaping from a pursuit delivers few rewards. The police cars have been scaled back from their nearly indestructible status in Most Wanted, making them fairly easy to cripple or simply outrun. The cops’ inclusion this time around is half-hearted at best, which is too bad as the chases in Most Wanted delivered some of the series’ most adrenaline-pumping moments. While there are a few pursuit-related missions in the game’s Challenge Series, their inclusion feels tacked on.

While the heart of Need for Speed has always been Career Mode, there is also a Challenge Series that contains three-dozen challenges, each of which will unlock game-related items. From the main menu you can also check your reward cards, to show tasks that need to be performed within the game to unlock additional items. While the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Carbon also include various online racing modes and scenarios, the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube editions do not.

With so many changes between editions it’s hard to say whether Need For Speed Carbon is better or worse than its predecessor. Racing fans will enjoy the new tracks and the limitless amount of tweaks that can be administered to their virtual rides. The canyon challenges are a fun addition, and drift races are a welcomed replacement over last year’s frustrating drag races. On the flip side, the idea of wingmen is better in theory than its implementation, and the lack of police challenges throughout career mode is disappointing. While the game delivers in the racing department, the video sequences and plot are epically goofy. Need For Speed Carbon is a fast and friendly racer that’ll have you squealing the tires for many gears to come.

NARC
PS2/Xbox (2005)

The 1988 Williams arcade game NARC had its name stenciled across the marquee, accompanied by bullet holes, splattered blood, and a hand written note that read, “say no to drugs.” In that classic side-scrolling game, players killed or arrested drug dealers and confiscated their drugs and money. It was pretty clear throughout the game which guys were good and which guys were bad.

In Midway’s 2005 game with the same name, the division between good and bad is not as clear. In Midway’s NARC you play one of two undercover police officers chasing down some drug dealers spreading a new drug (Liquid Soul) onto city streets. During your mission you’ll have the opportunity to take crack, beat innocent civilians to a pulp, and shoot anyone who gets in your way. Overall, the game looks and plays like a budget version of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series. You’ll run around a virtual town in that familiar third-person point of view, completing missions and racing from point to point. Throughout the game you can make either good decisions (like confiscating drugs from dealers and dropping them off at the police station) or bad ones (like shooting old ladies in the face with an assault rifle) which will turn your character toward either the good or the dark side of the force – the police force, that is.

If the adult language or violence levels in Grand Theft Auto made you uneasy, then steer clear of NARC, which drops more F-bombs than the South Park movie. And if the four-letter words don’t make it clear that this is not a game for kids, the action soon does. Part of your training involves learning how to apprehend, cuff, and beat suspects. Even as a beat cop, you will serve as judge, jury, and executioner. No one in your precinct will complain about the lack of a speedy trial as you proceed to crush the skulls of any drug dealers, dirty cops or jaywalkers you encounter. Most of the game’s training missions center around learning the different ways to kick suspects’ asses. “Don’t forget,” a fellow officer states, “once a suspect fall to the ground you can press Triangle to mount them and then press X and Square to continue beating them!” Your training session ends when the brother of a recent arrestee appears, gun in hand. Your final training session involves disarming the man and then shooting him with his own gun. Guilty!

NARC is essentially a sleezy, second-rate Grand Theft Auto knockoff. The graphics are dark and sometimes blurry, and the soundtrack is about as cliché as it gets (“I’m Your Pusher”? C’mon.) I had originally rated the game’s soundtrack a 6, but I had to constantly turn it down due to my son being in the next room. I can really only see two possible target audiences for this game – people who can’t wait for the sequel to Driv3r, and people who still think beating up virtual people for no real reason is a hoot. I played through about half of NARC over several days, and felt dirty afterwards every time. If you curse RockStar every waking moment for not making State of Emergency, then run as fast as you can to the nearest gaming store and pick NARC up. If you think you might get at least a minor “tee-hee” from grappling with criminals or hearing computer people swear, at least rent this game before buying it. Even with an MSRP of $20, you might end up feeling as though you’re the one who has been robbed.

Namco Museum Remix
Nintendo Wii (2007)

A quick scan of my personal game collection reveals Namco compilations for every disc-based system I own. I’ve got all five Namco Museum discs for the original PlayStation, Namco Musem for the Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, and the 50th Anniversary releases for the GameCube and PS2. When I heard that yet another Namco Museum release was in the works, this time for the Nintendo Wii, I was afraid it would simply be more of the same. It’s not — but after playing this mixed-up mash-up, you’ll wish it were.

Namco Musem Remix contains fourteen games which fall into two categories: five new remixes, and nine original classics. The menu system is a 3D platformer, where gamers choose games by navigating Pac-Man through a brightly-colored 3D world. it is here players get their first taste of Remix’s wonky controls. Actually, that’s not fair; the menu’s controls handles better and make more sense than most of the games do. Like of the games, navigating the menu requires nunchuck controller.

The nine retro classics included on the disc in their original form are Galaxian, Dig Dug, Mappy, Xevious, Gaplus, Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Mania and Cute Q. Each game can be played by either using the Wiimote and the Nunchuck together, using the Wiimote by itself, or using the Wii Classic Controller. I don’t own a classic controller, but hopefully these games play better with one of those than they do with the other two choices. The nunchuck/Wiimote combo is almost impossible, and the Wiimote by itself (rotated) isn’t any better. The Wiimote’s d-pad is amazingly inaccurate, making controlling these games much more frustrating than it needs to be. This makes playing the few good games like Dig Dug difficult to control, and the lesser-known titles frustrating to learn.

That leaves us with the five new game remixes: Pac ‘N Roll, Galaga, Pac-Motos, Rally-X, and Gator Panic. Your enjoyment level of these five games will probably hinge on how familiar you were with the originals, and how upset you will be when you discover than these aren’t like them. Your opinion may also be swayed by how much you like Pac-Man, as he appears in all the remixes for some reason. If you’re okay with those things, there’s some fun to be had here.

Take Galaga Remix, for example. In this version, you job is to protect Pac-Man as he rolls his way down open-faced tubes located in outer space (think interstellar water slides). As Paccy rolls through these tubes he’ll be attacked by updated-but-Galaga-inspired space bugs. Using the Wiimote as a laser gun, enemies are disposed of by pointing at then and firing by using either the A or B button. Although Pac-Man’s route runs on auto-pilot, you can make Pac-Man jump and dodge bullets by pressing up on the Nunchuck. Thirty seconds into the game I began to wonder, why didn’t they just make A jump and B fire and drop the Nunchuck altogether? Alas, that is not the way the Nintendo Gods wished it. Instead you’re forced to hold the Nunchuck the entire time only to make Pac-Man jump, a maneuver that’s required maybe once or twice per level. Somewhere along the way, the quintessential top down shoot-em-up has been transformed — er, remixed — into a shooter-on-rails starring Pac-Man in a rainbow slide. Hmm.

Most of the other remixes aren’t quite as radical in their redesigns, but they’re all significantly different from their source material. Feeding the stereotype that the Wii is catering to casual gamers over hardcore fans, all the games are simple to learn and, at least during the earlier levels, pretty tough to get killed in.

Namco Museum Remix’s lone bright spot is its multiplayer support. For those with enough friends (and nunchucks) available, the remixed games are slightly more rewarding. None of them will ever be referred to as your favorite game, but they do take some of the sting out of paying $40 for this title.

Wii owners with a thirst for Namco nostalgia should pick up one of the two Namco Museum titles available for the GameCube and play those instead.

Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary
2005 (PS2/Xbox)

To commemorate their 50th Anniversary, Namco has released pixel-perfect translations of sixteen of their greatest classic arcade games, all on one budget-priced disc.

Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary brings sixteen classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Galaga and Dig Dug directly into your living room. All the games play exactly like their upright counterparts, and they should by now; this is at least the third time Namco has released ported versions of these arcade games to the home console market.

Back in 1997, almost a decade ago, Namco released five separate compilation discs for the original Playstation. Some of the games on those discs include Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Pole Position I and II, Rally X, Bosconian, Xevious, Mappy, Dragon Spirit, and so on. In case you missed them the first time around, in 2001 Namco released Namco Museum for the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. Namco Museum includes, and stop me if this list sounds familiar, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Pole Position I and II, and so on. The five disc Playstation collection included a museum area, where players could view development stories and view related pictures. Namco Museum for the PS2/Xbox/GCN included updated versions of many of the games.

This brings us to Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary, which contains the following sixteen games: Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Rally-X, Pole Position, Pole Position II, Xevious, Dragon Spirit, Bosconian, Rolling Thunder, Mappy, Sky Kid, Pac-Mania and Galaga ‘88. If you include the import only Namco Museum Volume 6 (which included Rolling Thunder and Sky Kid), fifteen of the sixteen games have already appeared on previous Namco collections for home gaming consoles (Galaga ‘88 is the only debut, and to play it on Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary, you’ll have to unlock it first).

The menu on Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary presents gamers with rendered versions of arcade cabinets, and (only) three 80’s tunes that play in random order. Trust me — you will get sick of hearing Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” in a hurry. In an ironic note, while the games themselves take only a second or two to load, the rendered menu takes a solid 10-15 seconds to load each time you quit a game.

Analysis of the disc shows that the entire contents of Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary take up about 250 meg; it’s a shame the other 4+ gig of space (this IS the DVD generation, is it not?) weren’t utilized. Why not include 300 songs in the menu instead of 3? If this is supposed to be an anniversary disc, treat it as such! Where are the interviews, the behind the scenes footage, the commercials, the music, the EXTRAS? If you were to celebrate your wedding anniversary this poorly, you might not have a next one!

The one thing Namco did manage to nail was the emulation. All the games play perfectly and are indistinguishable from the originals, but is that enough in a world where every 10-year-old kid knows where to download these ROMs from? I’m not sure Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary offers gamers enough for their money. The games look and feel great, but they looked and played great the last two times I bought them. Without any extras or bonus features. These games are re-re-rereleases, and without anything extra included, I have no reason to purchase this. If you don’t own one of Namco’s previous compilations, then by all means this is a good deal — you can’t go wrong with 16 classic games for $20. But if you already own one (or more) copies of these games, Namco hasn’t given you any reason to purchase them again. Worth picking up if you already own compilation discs with these games; skip it if you already own them.