Namco has been rereleasing its classic games across multiple platforms for quite some time. The PlayStation received the brunt of the collection, in the form of multiple volumes of the Namco Museum. The PlayStation discs contained a collection of famous (and not-so-famous) Namco arcade games, along with a museum section that displayed interesting facts and trivia tidbits about each game. The Nintendo 64 received what was essentially a "best of" museum collection, which focused strictly on Namco's best arcade games and contained none of the background information contained in the PlayStation collection. Now, Namco has moved that "best of the best" collection over to the Dreamcast, and all of the strengths and weaknesses of that collection have been faithfully reproduced.
The games included on the disc are Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Galaga, Pole Position, and Dig Dug. The games have been reproduced fairly faithfully, though each features a few minor alterations. For starters, the pitch of most of the music in each game is a little lower than the original. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man look a little weird - the blue ghosts look fairly ugly and your Pac-character moves in a weird, jerky fashion. Dig-Dug's vertically oriented screen is too large to fit on your horizontal television set, so instead the screen scrolls when you go up to the very top or down to the very bottom. Pole Position uses the analog stick for more precise control, but it's too touchy for its own good. But even with these few imperfections, the games still play enough like the real thing to entertain. The games even have similar difficulty settings to the arcade games, and they display the original arcade-machine dipswitch settings when you enter the options screen.
If you're interested in playing classic arcade games, chances are you've already found your way to one or more of Namco's museum releases. If you already possess these games in another format, the Dreamcast version is completely unnecessary. But if you're a DC owner in need of an old-time Namco fix, the Namco Museum collection is passable.
