GAME BOY ADVANCE GAME RECOMMENDATIONS |

[#] Namco Museum (Namco, Game Boy Advance, 2001)

No frills, double espresso, no foam arcade compilation.

Each new console brings new cash-in arcade conversions, and the GBA was no exception. This and sister game Pac-Man Collection are effectively GBA ports of the PS2 Namco Museum to the GBA, just with the four Pac games split into their own compilation (Ms. Pac-Man sticks around here, no doubt because a Namco Museum cart without any Pac representation would've sold like bottled Magic Johnson jizz). As threadbare as that collection was, you can forgive it a little more when it's a lil GBA instead of a wholeass PS2. That said, and while this is a nice comp, there's one flaw that I know bothers some people, and it might bother you too.

You're getting five games here, Ms. Pac-Man (in toggleable full-screen ant mode or a scrolling maze with full-sized sprites variety), Dig Dug, Galaga, Galaxian, and Pole Position. The good news is these games are highly faithful and run great. According to a developer comment I saw on YouTube, this uses decompiled ROMs of the real games with the Z80 instruction set reimplemented in C, so in English, they're pretty damn accurate. Seriously, for a way to while away some time playing Galaga in an airport or whatever (I play mine on my 3DS with a Virtual Console inject), this does exactly what it says on the tin and it does it nicely.

The big omission is the total lack of high score saving. According to that same comment, Namco figured the doubled manufacturing costs putting a battery backup onto the carts to save scores would've killed their cart margins and just went without. Given high scores are a lot of the replayability of coin-op games, that might be a dealbreaker for you--or maybe the lack of any deeper cuts (Mappy, Xevious, Bosconian, Super Pac-Man, etc.) makes you yawn. I certainly wouldn't have turned down more games. For what's here, though, I can hardly complain.

Recommended for... arcade nerds whiling away time in an airport.

Reviewed	My favorite part
November 29, 2025	Zoning out to 25 Galaga waves at a time

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