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Hmmm... I'm not sure why the Japanese were so crazy about Druaga. It's like a very early (and much simpler) version of The Legend Of Zelda, which isn't a bad thing... the only problem is that the game is too damned slow! Had it been faster, I would have liked it more. Luckily, the sequel fixed that problem...

...and here it is. Ishtar was the sequel to The Tower Of Druaga, and it picked up right where Druaga left off. Now Gil (the hero from Druaga) and Princess Ki must work their way back down the Tower and escape. Everything from Druaga was improved tremendously in this version - the graphics, the music, the control, the speed of the game (thank god). However, to really experience Ishtar, play it with a partner - it's almost unplayable with one player alone.

Pac-Man has returned - in a pseudo-3-D perspective! Now he has the ability to jump over the Ghosts (of course, there are two new Ghosts that can also jump). This is definitely one of the more fun incarnations of Pac-Man that has appeared, and it was recently given a second chance at life by appearing on both the PS2 Namco Museum and the GameBoy Advance Pac-Man Collection. However you are able to play it, I don't recommend passing this one up.

An earlier version of Assault, this overhead shooter used one of the enemy vehicles from Xevious - the tank Grobda - as its main character. Somehow the tank had become insanely popular among Japanese gamers. You've got me as to how this insignificant little enemy became popular enough to warrant it's own game, but it did. It's a good thing that the game turned out to be pretty fun, or I would have been scratching my head in complete puzzlement.

For some reason this game reminds me of a cross between Capcom's classic Section Z, and Acclaim's shitty NES game Cybernoid. The end result is all right, I guess. I have put a bit of time into it, but it's not really what I consider to be one of the better games in the series.

My question - what the hell was Namco smoking when the came up with this one? Here's a better question - why did they put this on the NME instead of something a lot more deserving, like Splatterhouse or Phelios? I understand that when this game came out, the Space Invaders craze was still sweeping Japan, but still - they should have stuck to Galaxian rather than making this utterly boring and insipid game. On the plus side, the voice samples are quite funny - and incomprehensible.

Here's the one Pac-Man game based on the short-lived cartoon series that ran in the U.S. during the early '80s. This one gets trashed quite a bit (my guess is because it's not like the others), but if you can look past that, it's a somewhat amusing sidescroller that falls into the Super Mario Bros. category (even though it predated SMB by a year). It even has the same theme music that the cartoon had.

Hmmm. I'm still not sure what to make of this one. I never played the NES port of the game, but this isn't half bad. It can be a royal pain to control at times, but it has its own slightly addictive quality that keeps me coming back to it.

When playing this game, I feel like the character is running through some of the levels from Sega's Quartet - don't ask me why. It's an interesting game (admittedly, I've never seen a game about a guy that has to haul ass through a space station and cross the finish line before he gets blown up), and fun to play at times. Not bad.

Ah, Wonder Momo. If you can look past everything that's wrong with this game (for example, Momo can't be more than fifteen - and every time she jumps, she flashes her panties to the world), you get an somewhat entertaining, realy strange takeoff of Irem's Kung Fu. You could do worse than Wonder Momo, but you could also do a lot better.

And that's it. Those are all of the other games in the Namco Museum series for PlayStation (aside from the "enhanced" versions of games in the series like New Rally-X and Assault Plus). There are some great games in there... it's a shame that not a lot of U.S. gamers wanted to give them a chance. Those of us that did try them (and enjoyed them) know what they're missing.