Namco compilation, consisting of three games. Galaxian, Galaga and Ms Pacman. Conversions of three Namco classics including Galaxian, Ms Pac-man and Galaga. NAMCO took special interest in this project even though they weren't directly involved with the development of the CD-i version, the quality of the Intellectual Property had to be maintained. This went as far as the packaging itself which is detailed in the below Suggestive Themes boxout. Philips ADS were given a Pac-man arcade board with the chipset for Ms Pac-man to wire up so they had everything to do a decent conversion. It wasn't a straight port however, the entire game was upgraded to a 256 colour palette and also extra levels were added courtesy of Johnny Wood and authorised by NAMCO.
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I know that the CD-i isn't a powerful piece of hardware, and that getting pretty much anything that isn't a static picture to run on the darn thing is a herculean task for the system. But I kinda expect a compilation title of 3 early 80s arcade games to at least have some sort of consistency here. It really feels like each game was ported by a completely different team using completely different bases, and they threw it all on a disc regardless. Galaxian looks like a port of the famicom version, except weirdly smoother than I remember it feeling. Galaga takes forever to load, is letterboxed in its own tiny window for some reason, uses what I assume to be recordings of the arcade audio for its sound effects, and has a weird low-res jittery image to it, almost like they are doing some sort of unholy interlacing to the whole game in order to fit its miniscule resolution. Ms. Pac-man looks like it takes inspiration from the 16-bit tengen ports, though it lacks the pac-booster option to make the gameplay frenetic that those versions have. The sound effects for Ms. Pac-man are also off and your hitbox is way too deep into your character.
At the end of the day, even bizarro-world weird versions of these namco arcade games are still pretty fun all things considered. I'm just confused why the hell this game even exists. This came out in 1996, where by then the PS1, saturn, and N64 were the focus of gaming. Why the hell did Namco greenlight such a hodgepodge of ports for the CD-i of all things by then?????? Who the hell was buying this???? Truly a gaming enigma. Worth a play if you are an insane and curious namco fan like me, otherwise it's really not worth the effort to check out, just play ANY namco museum or something jesus christ