i figure i'm just doing video game reviews now.

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namco museum battle collection is a throwback to the good old days of coin operated video games. which pretty much means "the eighties".

the box boasts "over 20 of your favorite titles in the palm of your hand!" the box is a filthy liar.

what namco museum battle collection contains is three types of galaga, three types of pacman, three types of dig-dug, and three types of rally-x. i bet you didn't even think people liked rally-x. they still don't.

four of these games are "arrangement" games, which pretty much means that they took elements of good gaming and ruined them. galaga arrangement has powerups. galaga arrangement is a stain on the otherwise perfect record of galaga. it shames me and many others.

out of the nine remaining games (which brings us to a total of 21; 'over 20', accurate as it may be, is quite misleading) i only recognized two of them: mappy and xevious.

mappy is about a mouse. a police mouse.

xevious has less to do with mice than you might think.

with this new iteration of namco's old "throw a bunch of old games together" formula comes some interesting features, and by interesting i mean "pretty useless".

first is the game-sharing option. do you know what game-sharing implies? being able to share your game. which, i assumed, meant wireless multiplayer from one UMD. but apparently namco hates my culture, my family, and my thoughts on game-sharing. also my pets.

game-sharing, to them, involves one-level demos of arcade games being sent to your friend's psp. one level of galaga is possibly 30 seconds long. dumb. really dumb. well, it'd be a really awesome 30 seconds, anyway.

the other interesting feature is eight screen modes, five of which you will not ever need in your entire life. among these is the 'innovation' of rotating the screen 90 degrees so that you can 'take full advantage of the psp screen'.

in japan, the game "star soldier" has already implemented this feature.

i am having trouble figuring out why.

it works okay for the games that don't require any buttons. which basically means the pacmans and the rally-xs. everything else is, well, wonky. hold your TV remote in its normal position and pretend to play galaga on the middle of it, with the buttons at the top being the fire button. you can't. your brain will go into cranial failure. that's not even a real thing. but it would happen.

of course, you're probably asking yourself "OH THE GAMES, WHAT ABOUT THE GAMES?!" so i will review the ones that namco battle collection introduced me to. we'll start with one of the least interesting video game titles i've ever seen.

King and Balloon

see? the game involves a king shooting at balloons, and every once in a while a balloon swoops down and steals a villager. or something like that. i can't explain it well enough, it is something to be experienced. or, rather, something never to be experienced.

as you play the game, a painful thought shoots through your brain and electrocutes you because you know it is the truth.

this game is between "galaxian" and "galaga" in the games list for a reason.

it's a comforting thought, though, that the developers realized the errors of switching from an awesome space theme to a really confusing medieval theme with hot air balloons before they released galaga. or, as it would be called, king and baloonaga.

Bostonian Bosconian

although it's not billed as the return to galaga supremacy, the graphic design of bosconian is very...well...almost exactly the same. the ship looks like the ship from galaga turned into a rogue ship and ate another ship from galaga. plus it has the multicolored starfield.

it has some advantages, though. upon firing, bullets will launch out your back- and front-sides. plus you get to blow up hexagons! nobody likes hexagons!

THE TOWER OF DRUAGA

the title of this game is so EPIC sounding, isn't it?! so grand, for such a mediocre 80's coin-op hack'n'slash maze game.

the first thing you will notice about the game, besides the title, is that the enemies in the first level are probably made of snot.

then i stopped playing.

DragonBuster

what do you think of when you see a elflike boy in a green tunic, wielding a sword and fighting off skeletons?

of course the obvious answer is DragonBuster. this side-scrolling platform gem pits you against the aforementioned skeletons, as WELL as snakes and dinosaurs! YEAH I'M PRETTY SURE THEY WERE DINOSAURS!

this is what happens when my zelda preorder gets pushed back to 'sometime after the next twelve apocalypses'. they can't even interpret prophecy correctly. thanks a lot gamestop. or nintendo.

Grobda

"grobda" may look like a typo, but it is in reality a tank battle game.

with lasers. did i mention there were lasers?

basically you ride a tank around and shoot lasers. sometimes you put up a shield to block the lasers. it's kind of entertaining until they put you in a level with like twenty other tanks and they all have shields.

Motos

if you've ever played that mario party game where everybody is balancing on balls, trying to knock each other off a platform, and if you thought it was the best thing ever, then you will LOVE motos. i LOVE motos. this is the basis of the game, except replace your character with a Roomba and the other characters with marbles. go roomba go!

Rolling Thunder

guess what this game is about by its title.

nope, you're wrong, it's a side-scrolling platform shooter about a guy who hates people who can't color-coordinate. or at least that's what it looks like.

he apparently is also a guy that didn't figure out the cardinal rule of playstation video games:

X SHOULD ALWAYS BE JUMP IN THE CASE WHERE THE ONLY TWO ACTIONS ARE JUMP AND SHOOT. barring that, you should be able to customize the controls. you can't. and so, as awesome as rolling thunder may be, it's too confusing for me. it's like saying "this is the best movie ever, except you have to stand on your head the entire time". no thank you, mister headache. mister rolling thunder.

all in all, i would probably recommend this game. at forty dollars? probably not. but it probably won't drop in price. so, pick it up if you must, and get ready for the shocking realization that rally-x and rally-x arrangement are the exact same game.

Labels: Playstation Portable, Reviews