Pac-Man Museum + Review

Pac-Man is 42 years old, and to celebrate, Namco has gone all out and bundled many Pac-Memories into the Pac-Man Museum +. From his very first game, spanning decades and genres, with some amazing highs and some of the Pac’s more embarrassing moments. Let’s see if Namco Bandai has made a collection worthy of a museum.

Pac-Man Museum + comes packed with 14 different Pac games ranging from the original Pac-Man arcade to the Pac-Man 256, the endless runner/chomper developed by Aussie indie studio Hipster Whale (who also made Crossy Road).

I’ve played my share of Pac-Man games over the years, and there is a good variety of Pac-games here. Instead of just going to the well of old Namco arcade games, they have really dig dug deep. There are your platformers like Pac-Land and Pac in Time. Then there’s your Pac and Roll and Pac Moto for your 3D Pac. Even with the earlier arcade games like Super Pac-man and Pac and Pal, while you’re getting more Pac-Man, each game also adds its own twist to the formula.

Chances are slim you’ll love every game in the collection – Pac in Time wasn’t the most fun platformer in the SNES days, and Pac-Man Battle Royale is more of a mini-game than a full game. Overall there’s a good range of games that will sneakily eat up your time as you try to top your previous score.

I was looking forward to playing Pac-Man Championship Edition in the bundle, at first not realising the version I had enjoyed so much was the DX version. It’s still a fun version of Pac-Man amongst a bunch of other enjoyable Pac-Man games so it’s hard to be that disappointed…but they still should’ve put it on there!

Only some games are playable from the get-go, but it takes little effort to get the locked ones (well, outside of one game, which I’ll get to). The conditions to unlock the few games involve playing one of the other games a small number of times. Generally, it’s straightforward to do; however, Pac in Time throws a spanner in the works. It’s not just playing the game; you have to play it through to game over! If you want to play through the game and you’re not getting killed, you won’t make progress to unlocking the other game. You can just start up the game and die as quickly as you can until you get a game over and do it again. In hindsight, it feels like they made Pac in Time as the game to be played to unlock another, so people would have to play it. On the plus side you won’t have to spend long with the game now you know how to make sure the conditions are met.

With so many Pac-Man games here, it was always unlikely they’d all be hits, and across the variations and twists of the traditional game everyone will have their own preferences. If you consider Ms Pac-Man to be the pinnacle of the lot, then you’re out of luck, and if you keep track of Pac-Stuff then you’d know it wasn’t going to show up here either. Personally, Pac in Time is the Museum’s stand-out worst game. It’s an easy target; the connection to Pac-Man feels tenuous (especially given its connection to the Fury of the Furries games), it’s unpleasant to control Pac, and the levels just suck. Worse, it keeps you from playing Pac-Attack straight away.

Pac-Attack is a falling tile game in the vein of Tetris, although while you clear lines, you also need to try and position the pieces with ghosts in them where a Pac-Man piece can clear them off the screen. It’s another strange addition, however it’s not a bad one given how much traditional Pac-Man is in this collection.

The arcade room is an odd way to access the games. You can customise this smallish space with unlockable furniture and arcade machines. It’s a nice little touch, a room full of Pac-Machines. Although the easiest way to access the games is through the menu that’s just a button press away, the arcade feels like they could’ve done more with. You can spend coins on the gachapon machine for collecting Pac-Man statues to place around the Museum. With the limited arcade space and the statues being purely decorative it will have really limited appeal.

The arcade machines use credits which deduct from your coin count, so make sure you don’t decide to add a heap of credits unless you intend to use them. The console-based games don’t share this system, not that you should find yourself out of credits unless you go too wild on the gachapon. Even then, you can earn coins on the other games and all you need is one coin to play. It’s still a strange system and limitation to place on the arcade games.

It’s not a Museum where there’s archival art, videos or a behind-the-scenes, beyond a little bit of info that comes with each game. However, as before, there are a lot of games here for a decent price. On top of that they’re games that aren’t easily available legitimately.

Pac-Man Museum + has plenty for Pac-fans wanting a more varied collection of the pellet-munching mascot. It’s not unexpected that Ms Pac-Man is omitted. It’s a shame that the Championship Edition is included without the DX upgrade. The majority of the games in the museum are enjoyable enough to return to.

Rating: 4/5