The aforementioned Joysticks (seriously, look it up, it’s an awful movie with some great retro games in it) finishes up with a legendary battle in Super Pac-Man. Classic Pac-Man is still a great game even if you don’t play it via patterns. Many of the games here are really good, and have stood the test of time. There’s no sign of Ms.Pac Man, for a start, though that’s likely (but not definitively) due to weird ongoing legal issues between Namco Bandai and ATGames, of all people. It’s the fact that it’s a fairly lazy collection, especially when you consider that 9 of the 14 games in the Museum+ were in the earlier Museum collection. What’s disappointing about Pac-Man Museum+ goes beyond whether or not you’ve got prior Pac-Man collections, however. He’s been sent out onto the streets by big daddy Namco Bandai to hustle for yen on a consistent basis! It’s not like poor Pac-Man has been locked away in a vault since his early 1980s heyday. You could have also got your Pac-fix in via the 2001 GameBoy Advance Pac-Man Collection, the 2011 Pac-Man & Galaga Dimension cart or the many, many, MANY different ports of Pac-Man and most of the “core” Pac-Man titles over the last 42 years. The entire reason that Pac-Man Museum+ is a “plus” version is that it’s already released a Pac-Man Museum title back in 2014 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, which had 10 games on board – 9 of which are in this very collection. Namco loves releasing and re-releasing Pac-Man games and Pac-Man collections. Here’s my problem with it, and it comes back again to exploitation, at least partially. Which on the surface seems like a whole lot of Pac, doesn’t it? Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Pac & Pal, Pac-Mania, Pac-In-Time, Pac-Man Arrangement (1996), Pac-Man Arrangement (2005), Pac ‘n Roll Remix, Pac-Man Championship Edition, Pac Motos, Pac-Man Battle Royale and Pac-Man 256. If you like lists, the games you get are: It certainly gets the “a museum is a building” bit right, housing the games within in the context of a virtual arcade of Pac-Man games that you can design yourself within very limited constraints.īeyond that, what you get is a selection of 14 Pac-Man games, spanning from the 1980 original through to 2015’s Pac-Man 256. Sadly, that’s not really what Pac-Man Museum+ does. With all that merchandise, with all that cultural apparel, with so many games to pick from, a title like Pac-Man Museum+ should really live up to that museum billing, giving us a rich history of one of gaming’s true leading lights. Namco Bandai has done a lot with Pac-Man over the years, including many video games.Īt least 16 arcade games, a further 25 or so home console games, at least 21 mobile games, a handful of pinball games… basically it’s a lot of games is what I’m getting at here. If you want Pac-Man in a movie, watch 1983’s Joysticks, an 80s teen sex “comedy” that’s remarkable today less for the boobs and much more for the many classic arcade games that are featured in it. Pac-Man is also in the movie Pixels, but the less said about that the better. Whether it’s Pac-Man pyjamas, Pac-Man ice cream bars, Pac-Man board games, numerous Pac-Man cartoons, Pac-Man watches, Pac-Man socks, Pac-Man shoes, Pac-Man suits… the list goes on and on and on. I’d argue – and I’m right – that Toru Iwatani’s famous pizza slice (or corruption of the Japanese kanji for mouth, depending on which interview he’s giving) – is the video game character that’s been most exploited over time. Is there a video game character that has been more exploited than Pac-Man?
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