You Can Do the Pac-Man... But Why?

So I've got good news and bad news about the recently released Pac-Man Museum Plus. The good news? It's free if you've got Xbox Game Pass. The bad news? It's hard to justify paying much more than that.

Honestly, I didn't like the previous Pac-Man Museum either. The interface was counterintuitive, and the whole affair had the stink of the recent CGI Pac-Man cartoon wafting from it, with the unlikeable cast of characters shoved in the player's face. As an added, ahem, bonus, Ms. Pac-Man was briefly offered as free DLC, but the sound effects in this conversion were badly handled, with an incessant siren that dominates the soundscape and doesn't change in tone or speed as dots are removed from the playfield. There are better ways to play Ms. Pac-Man on the Xbox, whether it's the standalone port for the Xbox 360, the more recent Arcade Game Series port for the Xbox One, or the excellent Namco Museum 50th Anniversary on the charmingly chunky classic Xbox.

Nothing stirs the fires of nostalgia like an
ersatz character that didn't exist back when
these games were popular.

But Pac-Man Museum is ancient history... what's wrong with Pac-Man Museum Plus? Well, the first problem is the one you were already prepared for... thanks to meddling from AtGames, you not only won't be able to play Ms. Pac-Man in this collection, but she's been completely scrubbed from series canon, along with Jr. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man. Now Pac-Man lives with his Pac-Mom and two siblings, Pac-Boy and Pac-Sis, suggesting that he's a lot younger than he's been portrayed in the past. This is a minor irritant... after all, this is Pac-Man, not Mass Effect, and nobody's playing these games for the deep characterization of the cast of yellow spheres. But hold on, it gets worse.

A more significant issue with Pac-Man Museum Plus is its control. It suffers from sluggish response time and some downright puzzling choices from the design team. Rather than assigning the menu screen to, uh, the Menu button on the Xbox controller, it's instead set to the X button, which is entirely too easy to press on instinct until you retrain your brain to avoid it. 

These are the buttons you use to bring up menus.
That's okay, Namco, you've only been making
video games since 1979. How were you
supposed to know?
(image from GrandPugilist on Reddit)

You should know better, Namco. This is Console Game Design 101... you bring up menus with Start or Select, or whatever the menu buttons happen to be named on your system of choice. Action buttons are just that... for jumping, firing, and other actions that require an immediate response from the player. It's why they're large and set directly under the right thumb, not small and kept out of the way as menu buttons tend to be. Adding to the confusion is that while B is generally used as an action button in the games that require it, you'll need to hit the A button to enter letters in the high score screen. The same button would be used for both functions in the original arcade games, but for whatever mystifying reason, that's not how things work here.

As for the lag, you're going to notice some, depending on the game and your sensitivity to delayed responses. I'd describe the control in some of these games as "gummy," but others, like EGM's Mollie Patterson, have been less generous in their assessment. "There's something about the inputs in the Museum version that just aren't reliable," Patterson laments, "and that's a KILLER for Pac-Man: Championship Edition."

Namco made a cheeky reference to the Atari 2600
version of Pac-Man, which to be fair was probably
more of a disaster than Pac-Man Museum Plus was.
This collection is a black eye for Namco, but 2600
Pac-Man was a tumble down a long flight of stairs
for Atari.

From my personal experience, the faster a game is in this collection, the more likely you're going to miss turns and take a header into oncoming monsters. For the plodding console version of Pac-Man Arrangement, it's not a big deal... the game is slow enough that you'll usually take turns cleanly, and easy enough that you can course correct in the unlikely event that the game blows an input. For Super Pac-Man, you're pretty much hosed. Turning with the speed button held down was already a gamble in the arcade game... in Pac-Man Museum Plus, making turns is so fidgety that you're sure to waste precious time guiding Pac-Man to those last few cups of coffee at the bottom of the screen. It's time you can't afford to waste, because once Super Pac-Man's super invincibility and super speed run out, he's super screwed.

Perhaps the worst part of Pac-Man Museum Plus is that unlike Namco Museum, it's focused exclusively on one franchise, and largely on one specific style of gameplay. You can't take a break from Pac-Man and try something refreshingly different, like Rolling Thunder or Splatterhouse or Galaga '88... you're just jumping from Pac-Man to more Pac-Man, and all that dot munching is bound to get tedious. Beyond that, Pac-Man hasn't had the greatest track record with sequels and spin-offs, and it really shows with some of the games included. 

The cavalcade of bad ideas that is
Pac 'n Pal.

Where do I begin? Let's start with Pac 'n Pal, which takes the framework of the already flawed Super Pac-Man and replaces the thrilling speed with eye-rolling product placement for other Namco games, and an infuriating green puffball who delights in stealing your food and carrying it to the monsters' home base. You're no pal of mine, buddy. Then there's Pac-in-Time, an awkward side-scrolling platformer with slippery control and the worst utilization of the grappling hook play mechanic you're likely to find in a video game. We can't forget Pac-Attack, the lackluster Tetris knock-off that's equal parts boring and frustrating, or Pac-Mania, which keeps the contents of its ludicrously oversized maze a mystery to the player, or Pac-Motos, the video game crossover you never knew you didn't want. You know the really annoying parts of Marble Madness where you'd be shoved off the playfield by a vicious steel ball? That's the whole game. Be still my beating heart.

Gashapon! A registered trademark of Bandai
Toys, all rights reserved. Action satisfaction!

Pac-Man Museum Plus isn't all bad... it's free if you've got a Game Pass subscription, which is about the right price for it. It also lets you play Pac-Man Arrangement on a game console for the first time in nearly twenty years... I mean, the good arcade one, not the unfathomably dull PSP one. You can decorate your own virtual arcade, sandwiching Pac 'n Pal between two garbage cans where it belongs, and use in-game currency to buy figurines of all the Pac-Man characters Namco pulled out of their butts. They come out of a Gashapon, which beats you over the head with its Bandai branding, but doesn't literally give you lacerations as its name suggests, so you've got to give them credit for that.

Like most children of the 80s, I used to love Pac-Man, but the older I get, the harder it is for me to get excited about the character and his games. Judging from the sketchy quality of Pac-Man Museum Plus, I can't help but think that Namco feels the same way.

Death's Cold Embracer

If you were wondering why it suddenly just got harder to access your PSN account from a Vita or a Playstation 3, there's a reason for that. Take it away, Mr. Mario.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes for the sake of expediency. Thanks to a recent system update, your normal PSN password will no longer work on legacy consoles. Now you'll have to access your PSN account from a computer, click your avatar on the top right of the page, click Security from the options that appear, and get a special temporary password. You'll then need to turn on your PS3 or Vita, go to the PSN log-in screen, and enter your user name and the previously procured password to access your account from those systems. Got all that? I sure as hell didn't, which is why I'm grateful Endless Gaming Horizons offered an explanation of this overly complicated workaround on his YouTube page.

All kinds of funny business has happened to Sony's older consoles thanks to this vexing update. If you liked using your Playstation 3 as back up storage for all the games that wouldn't fit on a miniscule PS Vita memory card, you can forget about doing that now, because 4.89 chops through that functionality like Bruce Lee through a stack of cinder blocks, or Bruce Lee's estate through a suspiciously similar fighting game character. (I was going to report on this earlier, but the report from Nintendo Life seemed to be the end result of fruitless speculation, if this more recent report from ShackNews is any indication.)

If you haven't already done so, now's the time to jailbreak your PS3 and Vita and explore gray market sources for your games. It's not going to get any easier to use these systems legally, so hike up those pantaloons, fold down that eyepatch, and sail the pira-seas with either PKGj or CDRomance. Sony doesn't seem to give a damn anymore... why should you?

BREAKING NEWS! You may be able to access the games you've purchased! A recent post on the Playstation Blog suggests that you'll be able to play some of the legacy games you've previously bought on the Playstation 4 and 5. It's not an ideal solution, but it's better than cutting players off from their games entirely. Thanks to Reddit for this surprising revelation.

P.S. Oh yes, there's one other thing worth mentioning. In a puzzling move, Square-Enix recently pitched the rights to most of its Western intellectual properties overboard, with the mysterious "Embracer Group" scooping them up in a fisherman's net. (Why the sudden swerve toward nautical nonsense in this post? I dunno, I mentioned piracy and decided to run with it.) 

Embracer devours ALL!
(image from Reddit)

What you should probably know is that Embracer is the entity that owns T*HQ-Nordic, among dozens of other mid-sized developers. In fact, they're so big that they eclipse all other major game publishers in acquisitions, including Microsoft, which is currently wrapping its jaws around the frighteningly massive Activision. The fact that a company so shrouded in secrecy owns so much of the video game industry... concerns me a little. 

Skirmishes and Sojourns of a Stellar Variety

Current mood: pic.twitter.com/mWjLvAHvCN

— Capt. Osbert Twinge, Bt. KCB. (@RMcCarthy86) May 4, 2022

You know I'm not down with this phony, made-up holiday, but I will say something in defense of Star Wars. It lends itself incredibly well to the video game treatment, and pretty much always has, dating back to the arcade trench runs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those were followed up with the Atari Star Wars arcade game, then the Sega Star Wars arcade game released in the early 2000s, leading up to Factor 5's Rogue Squadron II for the GameCube. This was a game that not only faithfully follows the events of the first three movies, but looks damn good doing it. You look like you're actually playing the movie, or at least the sprawling action sequences.

By contrast, my preferred science-fiction franchise, Star Trek, took a while to get a proper video game adaptation, because it just didn't translate that well to a hands-on experience. You had the home computer simulations of the late 1970s, which involved a lot of dry ASCII maps and tedious resource management. It was a faithful experience, in its own abstract way, but not an urgent or approachable one. 

The perspective used in this box
art always struck me as weird.
The villains are in the foreground,
peering down at your ship as they
blast it with phasers. It's like they're
watching it from the top of a fish bowl.
(image from Moby Games)

A Star Trek game arrived in arcades courtesy of Sega (conveniently owned by Paramount Pictures at the time), and while that had more to offer adrenaline junkies, it lacked the dazzle of Atari's Star Wars, boiling down to a plodding overhead shooter with elements from the series. You just dragged yourself through space at a fixed altitude... there was no sense of dimension, no ships that artfully danced around your gun sights, and no scenery streaking past you at blistering speeds. With an arcade game, first impressions are everything, and there just wasn't enough impact to Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulation to make it exciting for anyone other than fans. I was on board, but even as a Trekkie I'll acknowledge that Star Wars was a more exciting, immersive experience.

Later Star Trek games would follow, with a rough approximation of the galactic exploration of the television show, but a lot of dull, impenetrable menu-based gameplay. Set up a communications channel with alien beings, find their locations on a star chart, stop by engineering to make sure the ship is in fighting condition, warp to the distressed planet, assemble an away team and... I'm falling asleep already. A proposed 3DO game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation had promise in early screenshots, offering a more immersive experience, but alas, it never got past an early prototype.

Michael Dorn does happen to star in Mass Effect 2
as a member of the Krogan; a sharky, froggy,
snakey race considered among the strongest
beings in the game. It's like if Worf tried to take
his ship past warp ten instead of the cast
of Star Trek: Voyager.
(Image from Mass Effect Fandom)

There were other games too, ranging in quality from "oh boy, why did they even bother" (Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time for the Sega Genesis) to "okay, now we're getting somewhere" (Deep Space Nine: The Fallen for PCs), but the only game that really captured the Star Trek experience for me was, ironically, not even part of the franchise. Mass Effect 2 reproduced the vastness of space and the cultures of different alien species better than anything I had played up to that point, then added an action element that, while not original, was more thrilling than anything you were likely to find in a Star Trek game. Dialog can be a dreadful chore in other games, but in Mass Effect 2, you actively hunted it down, engaging in lengthy conversations with your fellow officers just to get to know them- and the universe in which they live- better. I declared that Mass Effect 2 was a ten out of ten in my old web site, and I stand by that rating... nothing before or since has scratched that itch to explore strange new worlds better. (Not even, regrettably, the two sequels which came later.)

Darth Vader sold separately, by purchasing
the same game for another system.
(image from Fighter's Generation)

Okay, okay, back to Star Wars if you're going to twist my arm. I recently acquired a copy of Soul Calibur IV at a thrift store, and had to fire up my dusty old Xbox 360 to play it. When I was finished (an hour and a half later) I gained a new appreciation for both the system and that game. Here's a secret nobody wants to tell you... seventeen years after its launch, Xbox 360 games still look really, really good. Not so much the launch titles like Perfect Dark Zero, but Soul Calibur IV came out in the first half of the system's lifespan and it looks gorgeous, a pumped up version of Broken Destiny on the PSP with many of the same stages. The gameplay is great too, with a lot more to do than its PSP cousin. The only fly in the ointment is a punishing arcade mode, with a procession of increasingly cheap opponents capped off by the utterly infuriating Starkiller. You will quickly grow to hate John Williams' aggressively loud and pompous soundtrack as you continually fall to this character, on loan from the recently resurrected Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

You can play as Yoda, too. Or "as Yoda too, you can play." Whatever works for you on the fourth of Nerd-ly. The geriatric green Muppet is obscenely tiny, he moves awkwardly around the playfield, and he jumps three feet in the air before every swing of his light saber, just to gain the height to stick it in his opponent's face. He doesn't add much to the experience beyond a quite respectable character model (count the individual gray hairs on his head and just try to tell me Xbox 360 games look primitive), but you've got plenty of other characters available once you've unlocked them all with in-game currency. 

People typically put Soul Calibur IV far down on their list of favorite games in the series, often right next to its sequel, but I've got to say that I enjoyed it more than the recent game released for the Xbox One. The backgrounds are more eye-catching, the three segmented armor system challenges you to strike at different parts of your enemy to wear down their defenses, and oh yeah, the load times are far more reasonable. Look, I might want to play as Yoda, but I don't want to become as old as Yoda waiting for the next stage to start.