PLAYSTATION GAME RECOMMENDATIONS |

[#] Namco Museum Vol. 2 (Namco, PlayStation, 1996)

Two winners in a sea of mere curiosities.

In retrospect, it's weird that Namco decided to release two must-have Museum installments and then three ones filled with oddballs. They couldn't space the classics out a little more evenly? One suspects these were mainly built for the Japanese market, whose classics are different than ours, but no matter--for the more hardcore arcade enthusiast, Vol. 2 isn't bad. This time, you're getting Mappy, Dragon Buster, Super Pac-Man, Xevious, Gaplus, and Grobda. The museum wraparound and menus are identical to the first installments, down to the annoyance of having to "register" with the front desk before it'll save your scores.

From least upwards, Dragon Buster is an branching path dungeon sidescroller that looks kinda hideous (what is the main guy's sprite doing?) and is way too easy, to the point where I made it through three worlds on my first-ever game. Something's off there! Gaplus is one of the many updated Galagas, and I like some of what it does, like the tractor beam that lets you get not just double ships, but quadruple ships. At the same time, enemy movement into the phalanx is too erratic, and waves restart when you die, so I didn't make much progress. Grobda is a tank battler where waves take approximately five seconds. Everybody puts out some insane firepower, but you die in the blink of an eye, so games (and attention spans) really don't last long.

Super Pac-Man locks off portions of the maze initially, either openable with keys or with super pellets that let Pac-Man just break the doors--that's what PCP does to you, kids! At least until the keys start going to random doors, it's fun. That leaves two real winners of the pack, Mappy, where a police mouse navigates a maze of trampoline and cats to retrieve stolen goods, and Xevious, a breezy-yet-tense overhead scrolling shooter where you bomb ground targets while dogfighting in the air. These games have that Namco charm and addictiveness the others tend to lack--again, fascinating for the arcade enthusiasts and very little for anyone else.

Recommended for... adventurous coin-op geeks.

Reviewed	Supports analog controls?	My favorite part
March 21, 2026	No	Long games of Xevious

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