Jogado no Xbox Game Pass. Eu definitivamente não sou o maior fã de Pac-Man, então não sei se teriam melhores opções de jogos pra uma coletânea dessas, mas colocar Pac-in-Time e o Arrangement de console foi um ultraje complicado. Mas Pac-Man Arrangement (arcade), Pac & Pal e Pac 'n Roll Remix foram gratas surpresas e mostram tudo que já tentaram fazer com essa bola amarela.

Como coletânea de aniversário, eu esperava vídeos e imagens dos bastidores, artes conceituais, algum tipo de modo história com missões pra andar pela linha do tempo da série... mas tem um minigamezinho de gacha e decorar salinha. Fazer o que.

Probably one of the best collections out there, up there with Sonic Mega Collection and Kirby's Dream Collection. 14 games, some of which haven't gotten good rereleases in ages, or flat out have never been released outside of arcades getting full accessible releases is great.

Only major downsides are that Mrs. Pac-Man isn't here for relatively predictable reasons, that game is a rights nightmare, Pac-In-Time is a surprisingly unenjoyable game, and holy shit, who thought it was a good idea to have the main lobby's theme be a cacophonous mess of Pac-Man arcade noises and SFX haphazardly over-layed over one another. I know it's supposed to sound like an arcade of Pac-Man games running at once, but in the end it straight up sounds like a garbled mess and is terrible to listen to. Something more chill and low-tempo such as History from Sonic Mega Collection would've been more befitting to make me actually want to hang out in the lobby some and just simply sit around.

Psychological experiment by Namco to see how many times the human mind can be exposed to the Pac-Man theme in one hour before going completely insane. Very disturbing!

An ideal game for Game Pass - the sort of light-touch curio that would make you resent Pac-Man forever if you paid full price for it, but is very enjoyable as a noncommittal "free" offering that you can dip in and out of while playing your big meaty 4K HDR games and say stuff like "Pac-Attack fucking sucks!", "Can I unlock Baby Pac-Man?" and "Man, video games sure have come a long way since Pac-Man!"

The decision to host this smorgasbord of slice-stolen pizzas in an customisable iso-hub reminded me of the multi-storey Nintendo museum I built in Animal Crossing for the GameCube back in the day, which is nice, though I don't understand why a bunch of crummy original Pac-Man variants get their own cabinets and like, a dozen really good console and mobile games are all crammed into one games machine in the corner. Sad! Like Kirby and the Forgotten Game, there's a sort of deep sadness that comes from installing a virtual gatchapon machine in your virtual arcade, feeding it virtual coins that you got by playing a terrible 1987 US-only port of Pac-Man for the Amiga so that you can own virtual statues of cherries and berries...

Anyway, to save you some time:

MUST-PLAY
- Pac-Motos
- Pac-Man: Championship Edition
- Pac 'n Roll: Remix
- Pac-Man 256

SHOULD PLAY
- Pac-Land
- Pac-Man Arrangement

SHOULD PLAY, BUT YOU WILL BE WEIGHED DOWN BY AN INESCAPABLE SENSE OF LONGING FOR YOUR FRIENDS
- Pac-Man: Battle Royale

MORALLY OBLIGED TO PLAY
- Pac-Man

DON'T PLAY
- Pac-In-Time
- Pac & Pal
- Pac-Attack

Full video review: https://youtu.be/_r5xU9xSkLs

Nearly twenty years ago, I had this fun little Gameboy game called Pac-Man Collection. It was a bundle of four different Pac-Man games that allowed someone like myself - who didn’t get to really experience the arcade era - a chance to get into the Pac-Man series proper. Now here we are in 2022 with an exponentially better version of that game.

Overview & Customization
Basically, this is a collection of a bunch of different Pac-Man games with this cool “arcade” customization feature thrown on top of it. As you play more games, you unlock tokens which you can use to play other games as well as roll in a gashapon machine to unlock statues that you can then use to deck out your arcade.

Each game has a bunch of different “missions” to complete and these too unlock more cosmetic things to place, whether that be flags, figures, benches, tables, or even new wallpapers. Overall, the whole arcade customization thing is kinda basic, but it’s a fun enough distraction and definitely a better alternative than just a menu listing the different games you can play.

Games
That Gameboy game I mentioned earlier? It has just four Pac-Man games. This collection? It has fourteen, including everything from the original 1980 arcade game to lesser-known ones like the 2005 DS game Pac 'n Roll or the 1995 SNES game Pac-In-Time. Most of the games take up the traditional Pac-Man style gameplay, but those two examples, along with others, offer up a bit more variety - mostly in the way of platforming.

Not to say that they are all good though - I wasn’t really a fan of Pac-In-Time and Pac-Man Battle Royale is pretty much the worst thing ever if you don’t have others to play it with. It’s mostly balanced out though - a bit of good, a bit of bad, a lot of just okay. My personal favorite was probably Championship Edition.

Missing Games
That said, the collection is missing a few key Pac-Man games I would have liked to see. The major one of course being Ms. Pac-Man, although that is likely because the game was not developed by Namco directly. But then you’re missing stuff like Championship Edition 2, which is very surprising seeing as how the first one is included and Championship Edition 2 is perhaps the most definitive Pac-Man experience yet and would have likely been my favorite game in the pack if it were included.

There are others of course - the Pac-Man World series definitely deserves its own collection - but overall, it’s a solid collection and covers a lot of Pac-Man’s history. In fact, it is by far the most definitive collection of Pac-Man games yet and I would have no trouble calling it the best.

Overall
The collection plays well, runs just fine, looks great at 4k, and has just enough customization to make it more than just another collection of Pac-Man games. That and it even works right out of the box on the Steam Deck - where I had fun jumping from game to game.

So yes, PAC-MAN MUSEUM+ a pretty easy recommendation to make, not just for Pac-Man fans, but for fans of retro gaming in general. It’s got a fun batch of games to play through, some nice bonus features by way of leaderboards and arcade customization, and I am honestly struggling to find anything negative to say here - it’s just an all-around solid release and a great way to get into one of the medium’s most important series.

a solid collection! it's a really cute package with an alright selection of games. would have loved if they threw in some of the pac-man world games and got some quirkier ones like pac motos and pac n roll. the only big omission i don't understand is ms. pac-man. stuff like pac-man, pac-mania, pac-man arrangement (and less so the remake), championship edition, and pac-man 256. the rest range from not great to awful though. for 20 dollars if you're a pac-man fan and wanna run through some of the weirder pac-man games in a really well put together package with a fun customizable arcade room this is well worth your time!

Overall, this is a pretty decent set of games. It's great to have a reasonable way to play Championship Edition, Arrangement rules, and Pac-n-Roll Remix and Pac Motos are neat inclusions that I'm glad aren't stuck on the Wii forever. There are some choices about the games in this collection that I'm not so sure of, but I'll get to them later. The main complaint I have is about the presentation. Pac-Man Museum takes place in an arcade (which isn't a museum, so already failed the test) that you can customize. You unlock furniture by playing games and more characters will show up if you play more. This is mostly harmless, except there was very little thought put into any of it. The space you have is kind of small, so you can't make anything too elaborate without running out of space. You can't customize the furniture, and also you can't remove any of the cabinets, in case you were thinking of trying to just get rid of Pac and Pal. The characters that come in just kind of wander around without you being able to interact with them. I doubt anyone would find this part of the game anywhere close to something like decorating in Animal Crossing.

Every machine in the Arcade, except for one which houses all of the console games, uses coins. You start with 500 coins and earn more by playing the games. At first, you hear "each play of a game costs some of this in-game currency" and shudder, but the money never actually becomes an issue. The only way you can end up not having enough to play the machines that require money is if you just dump credits into a game or you spend it all at the gacha machine for more furniture. Money in this game is so inconsequential I'm assuming it's only here for the gacha machine because there should be no world where you could possibly not be able to play Pac-Man in Pac-Man Museum. It just feels pointless, along with everything else about this arcade. There's also a mechanic where some games need to be played twice in order to unlock other ones, which is very dumb, and even though I'm about 13 or 14 levels into Pac-in-Time, the game still hasn't registered me as having played it, so after days of owning this game, I still can't play Pac-Attack (not that I'm dying to play Pac-Attack). I guess I have to end my current playthrough of the game for it to count as a play, but then WHY would you ask me to play Pac-in-Time twice then, a game that is not played the same way the other arcade Pac-Man games in this collection are?

For a game called "Museum", there also isn't much in the way of archival content or extras. Most games do have some good art in their borders, but no concept art or stories about development, no scans of manuals or art collections, I think that kind of stuff should be standard given how many of these collections are coming out these days and carry this kind of content.

Lastly, I do have some gripes about some of the choices of games here. There's a reason why Ms. Pac-Man isn't on here, but its absence is still a bummer. Surely Namco can work SOMETHING out with the people who own the rights to that. The console version of Pac-Man 256 is also here and has always been strange to me. I can't imagine engaging with that game outside of playing it on your phone when you're bored, and its inclusion here feels more like trying to add more "value" to the collection than anything else. Championship Edition DX would've fit in so much better. Pac-in-Time and Pac-Attack are here, but no Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures? If the reason they didn't put that here is that they think it's bad, then why do Pac and Pal and Pac-Attack get a pass for being bad? And hey, why not try and figure out how to make Baby Pac-Man work as a console game, that would be a fun exercise.

If you have any affinity for Pac-Man, I would say this collection is worth getting. It has lots of great games, some of which are not easy to come by or even emulate, and having them immediately accessible on Switch made the collection worth it. I just wish there was more thought put into the presentation and arcade environment, and more effort into making this the "definitive" collection of Pac-Man games, which it, unfortunately, isn't.

EDIT: After playing this collection on and off for the past couple months, mostly for Championship Edition, I feel like I need to bring up the input lag. Maybe the Switch version just has it worse than other versions, but it’s become very noticeable, especially when I compare it to how CE DX feels on PC. As I’ve gotten better at the game it’s gotten more unbearable, so im knocking off a star for this collection. Still has its good points but im not convinced it’s worth a purchase really.

This is a really solid Pac-Man collection with a lovely presentation. I appreciate it making the titles unlockable by playing other games twice, which opened my eyes to other Pac-Man games that are pretty sick that I would normally have overlooked for CE.

What marks the game down tho is that Pac-Man Battle Royale doesn't have online play, which I feel like is the only way to play that on console. It's very much a multiplayer experience, and locals cuts its potential short.

Also it's lacking all the World games. Just turn Ms. Pac-Man into Pac-Mom and call it a day, I wanna play Pac-Man World 2 on something that isn't my dusty Gamecube at this point!

Other than that it's pretty good, I would recommend it. You can't go wrong getting it on Game Pass, since that's """free""".

I feel like I don't actually like playing Pac-Man all that much. There's a fair bit of variation here though.

Notably it includes Pac-Man 256 and strips out all of the ads and mobileness from it which is nice.

Maybe there's some more games in there that I'll enjoy, but I'm not so sure.

Well this is surprising. This game suddenly came out on Steam a day earlier than the expected release date. This might have to do with releasing in Japan's time, but whatever.

The game itself is just another collection of Pac-Man titles ranging from the original up to the PSP era. But what makes this one unique from other collections is that the "museum" is a virtual arcade which can be customized by the player. While I really do like this idea, it really wasn't executed the best.

The game itself runs off one type of in-game currency, which is used to play the arcade titles and purchase stuff for the arcade. And while you do start with a lot, It feels kind of unnecessary since everything is rather cheap. And there's not much stuff to buy anyways, aside from gambling your life away on a gacha machine that's just kinda there. Most of the content is only obtainable through playing the games and completing challenges anyways, But I feel like the currency shouldn't be required for playing the games and only for the unlockables. Speaking of the games...

I really like the selection. Not only do you get the obvious classics, but some newer titles from the Wii and PSP era are now included, including games from Namco Museum Remix. Lesser-known titles are also included such as Pac & Pal and even Pac-In-Time. And the Arcade Pac-Man Arrangement finally gets a re-release after a very long time. It's a really good set of titles. But a lot of it is nearly ruined by several other factors.

The emulation for most of these games are NOT GOOD. While the games perform perfectly fine, all the arcade games have no integer pixel scaling, and some have an ugly filter. This results in tons of shimmering and/or a blurry picture depending on the game. The sound emulation is not so good either. Most sound effects and some music sound rather off, even in the original 1980 classic. However the more modern titles and console games seem to have much better visual and audible emulation, albeit with the near lack of any upscaled textures. Hell it gets downright lazy too. The original Championship Edition is just stretched to fit on the screen and Pac-In-Time is in Japanese in all regions and subtitles are just thrown in there. And if you're playing on a controller, there is very noticeable input lag.

I should mention that ALL references to Ms. Pac-Man are completely eradicated. All the way to the point where any game featuring her is either removed or redesigned to "Pac-Mom." The reasons for why this is are best explained elsewhere.

But even worse, not only do the arcade titles lack good audio and visuals, there are almost no visual settings whatsoever and a complete absense in DIP switch settings. This is inexcusable. And even though they're just simple maze games, being able to make the game easier/harder would be much appreciated for the more casual or hardcore audience respectively.

And not only that, half the games need to be unlocked. And to unlock one, you have to play through a specific game completely until you get a game over. Twice. So unless you're intentionally getting game overs to speed things up, some games like Pac-In-Time will takes tons of "time" in order to unlock the next game.

After all of this, I'd be safe to say that Pac-Man Museum+ was likely rushed to release. But do I recommend this game? If you're only here to play the games and just have fun, I'd say go for it. But if you're somebody who really cares about the quality of the games. Hell no. But hey, at least this is a big improvement from what was given back in 2014.