PAC-MAN MUSEUM

As far as saying it right away: the only reason that I recommend PAC-man Museum is that this is the only way to play Pac-Man Championship Edition on PC. All the rest of this collection is shameful. PAC-man Championship Edition is a real gem, a brilliant modernization of the original dynamics of PAC-man, directing the game on scoring and performance in cycles of 5 or 10 minutes rather than endurance, which makes its formula still more addictive. It is also a very distinct game of PAC-man Championship Edition DX +, which is also an excellent game but does not rely at all on the same fundamentals. The other two games "recent" from the "Museum", PAC-man Battle Royale and PAC-man arrangement, are calamitous: Pac-Man Battle Royale is a confused and incredibly dusty party game (obviously, no online game), and the PAC-man arrangement of this collection is not the friendly original released in arcade in 1996 but the atrocious PSP version of 2005, with its uninteresting simplified labyrinths, its low unreadable perspective, and its Jackhammer sounds that give the migraine. As for the other six games, all emulating old arcade games or consoles, the quality varies: personally, I like very much the original PAC-man, PAC-Mania and PAC-land (one of the first games of platforms with horizontal scrolling, all the same), PAC-attack is a Tetris puzzle game whose concept is interesting but poorly dosed and whose experience is far too limited and repetitive, and Super PAC-man and PAC & PAL really give the impression that Namco had not understood anything that had made the success of the original PAC-man, both games being too loaded and unnecessarily complicated. No Ms. PAC-man, you'll have to go back to the cashier with DLC to play it, and no Jr. PAC-man either. But whether we like these classics or not does not matter very much-their presentation is awful, much less than what a free emulator offered more than ten years ago: we can not change the controls, all the games are windowed and occupy a whole small part of the screen with a big screaming border that attracts more attention than the playground and that one can neither change nor hide (and this is not only the case of the old games, the only game of the collection not to have a border is PAC-man Championship Edition), and no image filter is available. The local scoreboards are also not preserved (a peak), the ROMs of the old emulated games being reset at each launch, even if the best scores of each game are backed up and sent in an online ranking. To further aggravate his case, the PAC-man Museum menu imposes the aesthetics and the universe of PAC-man and the ghostly adventures, the animated series of 2013, each "stamp" (kind of mini-success) obtained in the collection unlocking a character or a piece of furniture of the series. The least we can say is that there is a certain public lag: I strongly doubt that the teenagers watching the series are very interested in these games, and conversely, the old drivers of the video game fans of PAC-man will only be able to cringe teeth in front of this dressing... Ah, and everything turns into 720p, impossible to play at a higher resolution. In the end, it's very simple: If you want to play Pac-Man Championship Edition, take advantage of a promotion to buy this collection at a low price, and if not, ignore PAC-man Museum and use other alternatives to play these classics.