A Sunday stroll through the museum

For Christmas I received a few gift cards for PSN to finally finished collecting the remaining volumes I needed for the Namco Museum.

Quite beautiful, right? Seeing each volume’s cover art sprawled out across the Vita’s home screen spelling out Namco looks so incredibly rad. But even radder is the content found within the games.

These collections are a real labor of love as they encapsulate many of Namco’s earlier arcade hits from the 1980s. All of the games in the collection use the code from the arcade versions and even have options for the DIP switches to modify game settings. Heck, as a museum piece, they even include an image of the arcade board!

Speaking of which, the game takes place in a museum where you walk around in first person view. Each wing of the museum is dedicated to a certain game such as Pole Position. When you enter a wing, you can view advertisements and merchandise for the game and when you get to the end there is an arcade cabinet where you can play the actual game.

The collector in me wants to really get the physical copies of the games, but cash and free space are more of a premium, so I’ll stick with the digital copies instead. But if I were to collect them I’d go all the way and get the Japanese versions that include the super cool case to store them all in, including Namco Museum Encore which never got a US release.

If you are a history nerd for games like I am and have a Vita, or a PS3, or even a PSTV, then give this retro collection a try. Volume 1, at least.

«Later, 2015 - Working stiff »