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.