The Namco Legendary Pack DLC for Atari 50 includes some classic titles and a great timeline… but it also left me wanting more.
Ethical disclaimer: The copy of Namco Legendary Pack DLC for the Atari 50 collection was provided to me by the publisher for the purposes of review.
That gets it reviewed; neither Atari nor Namco nor anyone else except maybe my cats has had any influence on this review — and even then, it was mostly just my cats staring in bewilderment at me playing Dig Dug, because why would you blow creatures up when you could cruelly toy with them before their demise anyway?
That aside, this review is 100% independent, and I feel like that’s an important statement to make given the state of the online game reviewing industry right now.
For more on Alex Reviews Tech’s ethics policy, see here.
When I reviewed the Atari 50 collection over at Digitally Downloaded a couple of years ago, I declared it to be the “gold standard” for retro game collections.
Also read:
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Review (Digitally Downloaded)
I still happen to think that this is true, because Digital Eclipse’s setup of a mix of game titles to play plus a museum-style timeline with interviews, press clipping and design documents gives gamers a significantly richer context in which both to enjoy those games as playable artefacts but also to compare versions and understand the history of the time.
It sits in a stark contrast to the many retro collections that just throw in a bunch of ROMs, an emulator and maybe a few scanline filters if you’re lucky.
The latest addition to the Atari 50 package is as DLC in the form of the Namco Legendary Pack, a collection of titles and a new museum style timeline that explores the intertwining fortunes of Namco and Atari in the 1970s and through to the mid-1980s.
I wonder where that full, fuzzy Pac-Man suit is now?
There’s a deep history to explore here, and some of the more interesting games of the era as well, though it’s not as though Namco (now Bandai Namco, of course) hasn’t been shy itself in exploring and exploiting its back catalogue of games across a lot of platforms over the past few decades.
In terms of the game lineup, you get:
- Dig Dug (Arcade)
- Dig Dug (2600)
- Dig Dug (5200)
- Dig Dug (Atari 7800)
- Dig Dug (Atari 8-bit)
- Galaga (7800)
- Galaxian (2600)
- Galaxian (5200)
- Galaxian (Atari 8-bit)
- Pac-Man (2600)
- Pac-Man (5200)
- Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit)
- Xevious (Arcade)
- Xevious (7800)
Which means some, shall we say, choices were made.
It’s fascinating to see the evolution of how a title like Dig Dug works, because you can go all the way from the Arcade original through to the 8-bit and 7800 versions, which are quite pretty for their time to the 2600 version, which, bless it, is not.
Dig Dug. A classic game, as long as you don’t think too much about how much animal extinction you’re contributing to.
Even its own mother thinks the 2600 version of Dig Dug is quite ugly.
I actually think it’s a version of the game that has some charm despite its blocky nature, however, and I’m also slightly enthralled by the 7800 version simply because I’d never bothered to check it out before and its close-in version of the Dig Dug map gives the game a different, slightly more claustrophobic feel.
Dig Dug, Atari 7800 style. It’s rather good!
Dig Dug is the title best represented in the Namco Legendary Pack, and while some of that reflects what Atari could do with Namco’s titles in this period – it would have been tricky at the time to get a 2600 version of Galaga up – the whole time I’ve been reviewing the pack, I’ve had the same thought, over and over again.
This is nice, but I wish there was more.
The first dot.. kind of.
What kind of more? My most obvious wish list item would be the superlative 2600 version of Ms Pac-Man (I’m an uncrowned world champion of that game, trivia fans), but I do understand why that’s not included because the rights to Ms Pac-Man are, shall we say… murky.
It’s not even addressed in the museum timeline, however, which does feel like a missed opportunity. Equally, though, the arcade version of Pac-Man, which Bandai Namco is more than happy to shovel out on every gaming platform plus interactive keychains and plenty more besides is also absent.
Do I 100% need another copy of arcade Pac-Man?
No, not really in a sense of never being able to play it, but its inclusion here would also allow me to compare the various versions that are present here, right down to the infamously awful 2600 version. There are some nice snippets around that game specifically within the timeline part of the game, though again I would have wanted more.
I think I knew one person back in the day with an Atari computer — can’t recall if it was the 400 or 800, though. I don’t recall playing Pac-Man on it, whatever it was.
My other issue here is that the Namco Legendary Pack tapers off at the Atari 8-bit era, and while it’s true that the Atari 50 pack doesn’t cover the Atari ST at all, it does include some Atari Lynx games. Why is the rather nice version of Pac-Land for the Atari Lynx not part of the lineup here? It’s very much a link between Namco and Atari, but it’s nowhere to be seen.
Being honest, I’ve always bounced off both Galaxian and Xevious as space shooters; given the choice I’d rather play, say, 1942 or Galaga.
They’re present if you like them, but they are titles that I feel have aged somewhat poorly unless you’ve got strong nostalgic memories of them. Even back in the day, I gravitated towards other arcade machines.
At US$7.99 – my review copy was provided by the publisher and at the time of writing this review I can’t check what the Australian pricing is going to be but will update when I can – the Namco Legendary Pack is certainly interesting, and it’s thankfully not really overpriced.
Still, I do kind of feel that it would be nicer with a bit more content, and that the target market – basically people my age for the most part – might have been willing to pay a little bit more to get a larger collection of titles or more contextual history wrapped up in the package.
The Namco Legendary Pack is good, but it feels like parts of what could have been here are held back, which stops it from being truly great.
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