Video game museums are beautiful places. I'm just now having this epiphany that I love being in museums in video games. I'm thinking about certain parts of the Radiohead Kid Amnesiac experience, the museum section of Sonic Mega Collection, Animal Crossing museums, the trophy gallery in Melee, Bubsy Visit the James Turrell Retrospective, all these things are very different but are what I would consider to be vital video game museums. And in that list, near the top, is the titular Namco Museum.

So Namco Museum games have been on basically every console since the PS1, and if you've played any entry besides the PS1 games, you wouldn't realize that at some point there was an actual "museum" to this so-called "Namco Museum". It's not just a catchy name for a collection of old games, it was an actual virtual location to walk around and observe exhibits in. You play as Pac-Man, as indicated by the adorable Pac-Man sprite in the bottom left corner that walks when you walk and goes "!" when he notices something you can click on. After giving a nice robot attendant your 3-letter name, you begin to wander the halls of the (relatively small) museum, featuring 6 main exhibits dedicated to the games on this entry in the series and a lounge dedicated to extras. The calm and atmospheric music, the PS1 textured marble tiles and columns, it's perfect video game museum vibes, and, tragically, this feature never made it outside of these initial entries. There's an option for if you want to just get straight to the game, you can just immediately start playing Pac-Man if you'd like, but I'm the kind of person who would much rather walk slowly to Pac-Man after going through the Pac-Man exhibit and observing several pieces of Pac-Man paraphernalia.

As for the game selection itself, obviously, you want to open with Pac-Man and Galaga, that's a no-brainer. But other all-timers like Dig Dug and Ms.Pac-Man are left out, not to be seen until later entries in the PS1 Namco Museum collection, in a move that is absolutely motivated by getting you to buy more than one of these games, but I think Namco makes up for this tactic by having this entry include two games that most people wouldn't recognize: Toypop and Bosconian. These are not only obscure entries but also just plain fun games, so including them in the first volume was a great idea. It sets the ground rules of these games: A little bit of the classics, and a little bit of the deep cuts, all treated with the same amount of historical importance. And Pole Position is there, say hi to Pole Position for me I guess.

Now obviously, this game, and this series on the PS1 in general, is not the ideal way to play any of these games. You can only play them with a d-pad, they don't emulate sound perfectly, and they take a hit lag-wise. And the museum aspect itself has some problems, like every image and piece of an exhibit taking around 5 seconds or so to load, which ends up discouraging you from checking out every piece of the museum if you value your time. But despite these problems, the vibes win out in the end. I haven't even mentioned the fantastical rooms that each game resides in. After going through little bits and details of each game, you go through a door that transports you out of the museum and into another world, much like these games did for the people who played them. Each of these rooms also has an incredible arrangement of their respective game's theme, made even more impressive considering most of them didn't have much music to work off of. No matter their problems, these games might be worth it just for these arrangements alone.

As someone who is very intrigued by Namco's classic arcade line-up and also someone who loves going through a virtual exhibit, I cannot wait to go through the rest of this series. I know this is not the ideal way to experience these games, except they are, because they're in a cool ps1 museum. Who needs accuracy when you have vibes?